Z Space Blog

The build is finished! I built it on May 28th and have spent most of my computer time configuring it ever since. Here's a rundown of what's under the hood:

• ASUS M4A88TD-M, AM3 880G, SATA 6.0 Gb/s, USB 3.0
• G.SKILL Sniper DDR3 1333 (2x4GB)
• 2TB HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000 SATA 6.0 Gb/s, 3.5"
• AMD Phenom IIx6 1090T Black Edition 3.2 GHz, hexcore

The mobo has an onboard AMD Radeon HD 4250, so it will hold me over until I buy a graphics card for it. I'm aiming for the $100-150 price range, which puts me between a Radeon HD 6770 or a GeForce GTX 550 Ti. I don't do any heavy PC gaming, so I have no need for insane graphic capability. Even the 6 cores are more than enough.

I want to try some new software with this build once my main apps get setup. Thankfully I only have a few more apps to setup before I can start exploring. I've already switched from GNU screen to tmux, however. The switch was very smooth. What took me a day or two to configure in screen could be achieved with an hour or two with tmux and its great manpage. I'll be sharing it via my cgit installation soon. I'll likely be getting rid of screen, but will hang onto the configuration file so people who decide to use it have a configuration that's nice or gives them ideas.

2022-08-29 UPDATE: This rig is still going! It's mostly for some mid-tier PC gaming from time to time, but there's an AMD RX580 6GB powering the graphics now. Whatever I build next won't need a new card for a little while. :)