**This is an old revision of the document!** ----
===== computer upgrade ===== 2009-06-09. I ended the semester with my PACE account (10 GB) and home computer (180 GB) crammed with thousands of binary flow fields from time integrations and parametric continuations. The time integrations can be recomputed pretty easily, but parametric continuation is not cheap. So I decided to upgrade to larger disks at home, and a faster CPU while at it. After some research I settled on the AMD Phenom II 955 ($245). The Intel Core i7 920 ($280) is a faster chip, at least for single threaded applications (it boosts the clock speed when running just a single core), but according to the few scientific benchmarks I could find the i7 multicore scaling seems to be poorer than the Phenom II. Also, X58 motherboards for Core i7 are all > $200 high-end dual-graphics monsters, whereas for AMD I found a good $85 just-the-basics Gigabyte motherboard for AM3. I also trust AMD to keep putting out chips with good price/performance ratios, compared to Intel. So, here's my new rig 1 x ($245.00) CPU AMD|PH II X4 955 3.2G AM3 R $245.00 1 x ($64.99) MEM 2Gx2|GSK F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ R $64.99 2 x ($94.99) HD 1T|WD 7K 32M SATA2 WD1001FALS $189.98 1 x ($84.99) MB GIGABYTE | GA-MA770T-UD3P AMD770 $84.99 1 x ($29.99) A64 COOLER |ARCTIC FREEZER 64 PRO R $29.99 totalling some $600. I used my current Lian-Li aluminum case, DVD burner, power supply, graphics card, etc. The new computer is up and running (opensuse-11.1). Each core is about twice as fast as the cores in my old Athlon X2 4200+ and my Core 2 Duo laptop, and it has 4 cores instead of 2. I have the disks on RAID-1 (mirroring) and 870 GB is devoted to my home directory. Backups are onto a 500 GB external USB drive, automated daily/weekly/monthly snapshots with rsnapshot. I will soon have to modify my backup scripts so that data-* directories (time integrations) are left out. My old ASUS motherboard, memory, and Athlon X2 cpu are going to my buddy David Johnston in Chicago.
