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It is about time for a new system to be built. Our current Windows machine is aging and we need something to keep up with all the latest the graphically-intensive games, er I mean office suites and productivity software that are out there now.

So we’re building a new system. Right now we have two components on order: An ABIT AT8 motherboard, and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU.

The Motherboard

I went for this motherboard because of two reasons: It supports AMD processors (which are generally cheaper than Intel chips but have better benchmarked performance) and it has 4 PCI-Express slots, two of which are x16 slots suitable for killer graphics bandwidth. The motherboard supports ATI’s Crossfire technology, allowing two video cards to act as one to double performance. According to reviews on Anandtech, this board is a nice board to overclock and has some good utilities to manage your clock speeds from the BIOS and from within Windows.

The CPU

The AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ has what I need from a processor. It’s cheap, its dual-core, and its 64 bit. It runs natively at 2 Ghz, but it is a very easy chip to overclock. I’ve read about people clocking this thing to 2.5 Ghz without any stability issues. So while it isn’t the fastest chip on the block, it is blazingly fast for the price.

I’ll be getting more components as time and money allow. I plan on having 2 GB of RAM, 2 ATI Radeon video cards with 512 MB of RAM each, and a nice fat SATA hard drive. Soon I’ll be able to visit Ironforge on WoW without lagging! Woohoo!

So we’ve been in our house for a little bit now, and we’re slowly getting into a routine. Work, gym, unpacking, cleaning, etc. It feels good to be done with all the crap involved with moving across state lines. Now if only I could help my sister Lisa and her family move back to Oklahoma from San Antonio, everything would be perfect.

Warning: The rest of this post will probably only make sense to two of the three people that read this blog.

Work is going well. I’m in the middle of two projects, one a JavaServer Faces web application and the other a smaller web application using Ruby on Rails.

Working with JSF is very refreshing after dealing with Struts for so long. It is so much easier to create applications with JSF and I can wrap my mind around the components, backing beans, and other stuff far easier than I can Action classes and ActionForms. And Ruby on Rails is even easier than that, although I’m finding that it gets pretty difficult to work with if you want to do anything advanced and enterprisey.

I like Ruby on Rails enough to consider ditching Wordpress on this site for something homegrown. I think I’ll play around with that this weekend, so if things look a little wonky, that’s why.