My New 'Rig'

The personal webspace of James Dunn

Being a web designer comes with certain inbuilt assumptions that people make about you, examples of which include: you can instantly build them a website, you understand about all that "code", and you use a Mac.

I use a PC and always have. I'm not going to get into a full blown discussion about the pro's and con's of Mac vs. PC in a design environment here as I think everyone works best with the tools they are familiar with, and at the end of the day, Photoshop is Photoshop, and when writing code the platform makes little difference. I am going to tell you about my new setup.

I have been using my new PC for a couple of months now, and its been the second great purchase I've made from Viglen. It's a heavily customised machine from their Genie range, built to my specification with the following basic configuration:

• Motherboard: Intel D975XBX2 with integrated Gigabit LAN
• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2* 2.66GHz)
• Memory: 4Gb RAM @ 667MHz
• Hard Disk Drives: 2* 320Gb Serial ATA 300
• Optical Drives: 2* Sony Multi format DVD 16x Writers
• Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 7.1 (outputs to my stereo)

Up until now I've always had an old fashioned CRT monitor at home, but I've finally decided to splash out on some flat panels. One of the most useful things I've found for design work is having a dual screen setup. I've therefore now got:

• 16:9: LG Flatron L226WTQ (native resolution of 1650 x 1050 pixels)
• 4:3: Fujitsu Siemens Scaleoview L19-2 (native resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels)

These both connect via DVI cable giving an excellent crisp picture, powered by a:

• Graphics Card: BFG (Nvidia) GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 640Mb

...which is simply awesome.

This is polished off with a backlit keyboard from SpeedLink.

As for peripherals:

• Printer: Samsung CLP-510N Ethernet (Colour Laser)
• Networking: Netgear DG834G (Wired & Wireless)
• I've also reformatted my old PC for backup purposes and for when things simply won't run on Windows Vista

My OS of choice is Vista Ultimate which despite a few compatibility issues to begin with, and a mild learning curve is turning out to be alright.

So how does all this stuff stack up? If you want to go by Microsoft's "Window's Experience Index" this setup achieves a score of 5.5 out of 5.9, let down only by low scores in RAM speed. On a more practical note, the system seems to take just about everything I can throw at it with ease: I can have multiple browsers open, three or four Adobe products running and be working on large files with no dip in performance. As for the cost of all this - lets just say that Viglen and Ebuyer have made a few pence out of me this year.

Posted on December 03, 2007 20:49 | Add Comment →