Over the years I have run and built many computers. Back in the 1990s I was a dedicated Amiga user, but I had to concede in the end that the platform was dead. I was running an Amiga 1200 that was extensively upgraded with a more powerful processor, lots of memory, a big hard drive and a CD ROM. Well it was a lot more powerful than any standard Amiga. So I decided I would have to move to Windows and bought a PC from some company in London. I think that was a 300MHz Pentium 3. Since then I have built various machines around AMD processors with the most recent having a quad core chip. That was back in 2014. Last year I finally upgraded the memory from 8GB to 24GB as it was struggling with some things. I am not a gamer, so it was more about things like video editing and general web use. Modern web pages are very intensive for processing.
I had seen that prices for memory and storage were increasing due to demand for data centres and AI so I decided I needed to bite the bullet and get something more up to date. I looked at Power Computing who have been around since the Amiga days and are not far from me. They allow you to specify what hardware you want and I was willing to pay the extra for someone else to assemble it. A few weeks ago I picked it up from their shop.
I went for a tower as I want it to be quiet and to be able to add more storage. The supplied hardware was:
One of my criteria is that a PC should be quiet as I will want to record music in the same room. I just had to make some compromises to keep the price down. Water cooling may be quieter. Power Computing tweaked my requirements a little to use more of the be quiet components and all I hear is a very low hum.
I also had to compromise on memory. Another 16GB would be about £200 now. Although I do not play games the GPU can accelerate things like video rendering and I may find other applications for it.
Obviously things have moved on a bit in the last 12 years. Memory and solid state drives are much quicker now and the processor has 16 cores so things will just be quicker. I noticed that immediately with some web pages such as Youtube that would take several seconds to load before and are now almost instant. The old PC had a small SSD drive, but this new one is much quicker.
I try to avoid Windows and so I did not buy that for this PC. Instead I installed Ubuntu Studio that includes most of what I need for audio and video on a solid Linux platform. The install from a USB drive was simple. I moved over my old 2TB hard drive and DVD writer. I have some other drives that may go in there too as there is plenty of room.
So far I am happy with my purchase. It seems that every time I want a new computer the price is about the same, but you get much more for your money even with the current supply issues.
I am still using my previous iiyama display, but will have to replace my second ancient screen as this PC only has HDMI and Displayport connections that it cannot use. I am also using my existing Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 audio interface. These things just work with Linux.
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