New development machine

I've spent some time and money on a development rig for home, and I ended up with te following experience numbers.

windows experience index

That is great result for a complete machine under 1500€. Here are my first impressions on some of the components.

Intel X25-M 80Gb hard drive

You notice at once the at once, the difference between a traditional hard drive and this SSD from Intel. File operations are blazingly fast, and I use this disc as my system disc and have a traditional Western Digital Caviar Green as my main storage for games, programs, music and movies. With this drive my Windows 7 boots in no more than 10 seconds from POST, which is nothing short of amazing.

Gigabyte ATI Radeon 5750

I was looking for a low budget graphics card, since my focus is not playing games but development. I do not want to exclude the posibility, so a card that does not sound like a motor way and with low power consumption. Today, my girlfriend fired up The Sims 3 in full HD resolution without any complaints from the graphics card with neither lag nor noicy fan. I'm very happy with this choice!

Asus P7P55D and Intel i5 750

I found out that Intel i5 750 actually outperformed the old Intel i7 920 and is cheaper at the same time. This is the best choice for any budget computer, but still has a very sharp edge. It seems like a very happy combination together with the Asus P7P55D mother board, which was a joy to install in my system. I have not found any real annoyances with this mother board yet, and troubleshooting failing components is a blast with on board leds that tells you whats wrong. No more looking up short beeps, long beeps in the manuall to try to interpretate why system boot is failing.

Complete specifications

Here is a complete specification of my system. Enjoy!

Chassis: Antec miditower nine hundret two
PSU: Corsair TX 650W
Motherboard: Asus P7P55D P55 S-1156
CPU: Intel Core i5 750 2.66Ghz
CPU cooler: Noctua NH-U12P
System drive: Intel X25-M 80Gb
Storage drive: Western Digital Caviar Green 1Tb
RAM: Kingston DIMM DDR3 4Gb 1333Mhz CL9
GPU: Gigabyte Radeon HD5750 1Gb GDDR5