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Old 13th November 2008
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nfries88 nfries88 is offline
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Default Needing recommendations

Before Reading:
I know there's an already active topic on this matter, but my hardware needs are a bit "special".
I'm joining the US Navy (leave for RTC in less than a week) and will have a very limited space for my personal belongings and unfortunately no laptop I've seen will meet my needs well. My computer will be used primarily for software development, porting, and testing; but also for more typical things like gaming and websurfing.
Because my computer will be used for software porting and testing, I will have at least the following systems installed: Windows XP, Windows Vista and GNU/Linux. Most likely I will also install a *BSD (FreeBSD probably) and Solaris on a second hard disk.


I'm looking at getting a MicroATX form factor case and motherboard to meet the space requirements more easily.

I'm looking at an ATI Radeon HD 4850 for my graphics card. I would like to be able to CrossfireX multiple of them, but won't cry about it if I can't. If there's a reason I should look into a different card (other than general performance), please speak up.

I'll be wanting a dual or quad-core processor.

I plan on having at three SATA hard disks: Two for the various systems and data, and one Solid State Drive for virtual memory.

I would like to have a DVD and Blue-Ray player, so I'd need either an extra SATA an ATA controller for that.

To avoid too many messy wires, I'll probably be looking into a good wlan card and a wireless keyboard and mouse.

There may be some occasions where I'll need to transfer data between computers without access to the internet or a local connection between them, so a couple of USB ports are a must.

A friend of mine recommended the "Creative Labs X-FI Xtreme Gamer Fatality" Sound Card for gaming and listening to music, but I have no idea whether or not there is even any GNU/Linux support for it.

I don't care about whether or not I have a floppy drive or a memory card reader.

I'll be wanting at least 2GB of DDR2 memory to run Vista smoothly.

Money is not an issue, but feel free to save me some where you feel it's wise.
As you can see I have a pretty good idea of what I want, just not the very specifics (I am far from "up-to-date" with hardware technologies and know little about what hardware is unsupported or poorly supported by Linux and FreeBSD).
I understand that MATX is pretty limiting, so if I can't have *everything* I won't freak.
If all the hardware is compatible I'll have no issue putting it together.

EDIT:
If you can find them all at TigerDirect, where I've been bought my computer hardware since my very first one, that'd be great.

Last edited by nfries88; 13th November 2008 at 01:54 AM.
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