Sleepless Travels Reloaded

One of the prime perks of working in such a central location is the plethora of purchasing experiences one may obtain during a limited amount of time, say, an hour-long lunch break.

Today I went down to MSY, a leading Australian budget IT retailer. My cousin says it’s the cheapest around at the moment, and I always believe what my cousins says about prices.

It appears to be geared towards people in the know. It doesn’t exactly have the most welcoming facade. When you enter you seem some messy desks, behind which are boxes and stacks of random computer parts. You queue up and then tell the person at the counter what you want. There are full price lists available (text in 6 pt font) however for the uninitiated the alphabet soup of numbers and letters may not be helpful. The lone front desk guy was a middle-aged Chineseman. A middle-aged Chinesewoman was grabbing goods off the packed shelves behind the desks, haranguing the Chineseman (as to computer shortcuts, and how to work more efficiently and faster, faster, faster) as customers read out what they wanted from the price lists. Aha. My sort of place.

It all works marvellously well. The unspoken rule is not to dither and ask the wrong sorts of questions, (”what is the best hard drive around?”). Everyone in the queue will glare at you for not having previously done research, n00b. There is a lack of customer service in that there may be no stylish shop fronts or neatly coiffed “customer service personnel”. MSY’s website really sums it all up. A focus on information and zero wastage of resources on needless foibles like a website designed in this decade. There is no spoonfeeding. There is sufficient information on that pricelist for you to google and make your own informed choices. The standard 7 day return policy applies, as well as a 1 year warranty on everything. What more can you ask for?

So I bought:

• A-data 1 gig DDR1 notebook RAM - $55. [I wanted Strontium, only because it sounded cooler, but the only other one they had was Kingston and that was $97!!]
• Samsung 160g IDE notebook HDD - $65 [yeah I use DDR1 RAM and IDE HDDs my book is ooooooooold]
• ASUS b/g wireless PCI network card - $21 [I wanted Netgear to match up with my modem router but it was sold out :< ]

and…-drumroll-


• ASUS EN8400GS SILENT/HTP/512M
  

See what I mean about the alphabet soup? I had to read a beginner’s guide to graphics cards on Tom’s Hardware as well as consult with various gaming enthusiasts before I could make sense of this!

By that time I got pretty sick of it all. I knew what the numbers meant but didn’t look up any reviews on the card. I just needed a card that was a whee bit more powerful than my current motherboard server graphics card (Volari Z7 16mb - laughable!) which couldn’t run Coverflow and had difficulty in playing videos smoothly. I don’t game. And since I only had a PCIe x4 slot available (-shakes fist at Dell SC430’s limitations-), which I had to mod, a powerful card would be pearls to swine.


NEC Versa s3000

While the RAM and HDD is to extend the life of Setsuko2, my notebook, the wireless card and the graphics card is to turn Ryuhei3, the server box (which runs very well as a server btw) that I bought way back in 2006, belatedly, into a desktop. I still half wish I bought a normal desktop system instead because its weird configurations make it expensive to fiddle with (had to get ECC RAM for it…sigh) however the case is admittedly very cool. While I was in MSY today I looked at the other cases they sold and they all looked uniformly cheap and ‘orrible looking.


Dell SC430

So with that background in mind, I picked the 8400GS for the following reasons. It was only $3 more expensive than the 256mb version and 512mb seems to be the norm these days. Within the 512mb range, it was the lowest and therefore cheapest model available. I hadn’t heard of ECS and I remembered C recommending ASUS. So basically I picked it because it appeared to be value for money.

The SC430 is silent. I like it that way. My pc1 (no given name because I hadn’t developed a nomenclature then) has a whine that can be heard down the hallway, in the bathroom. With the door closed. With the tap running. I wasn’t even sure if whatever graphics card I picked would work as the server is now discontinued and all forum discussion on Whirlpool and Overclockers Australia had ceased around late last year. All the graphics card models are different now. More reason to pick the cheapest card I could find.

So I was expecting a not terribly good fan, but I hoped that technology had progressed so that even the cheap fans weren’t too crappy, or that my graphics requirements would be so low as to not be too taxing on the card and thus not to have the fan turn on.

To my surprise, when the box was handled to me by the middle-aged Chinesewoman, I saw text like “silent” and “0db” on the box! Could it be? Can one hope?

….it has passive cooling!! No visible fan. A solid chunk of metal running down its beautiful fish skeleton spine, chilly cold to the touch. Oh, dream of dreams!