Course Selections – Winter 2008/2009 and Spring 2009

I picked out most of my courses and, inevitably, my major last week after seeing an advisor at my school.

I’m double majoring in Network Security and Computer Science. Next semester(Winter) I’m doing Work Study, which will give me 4 credits for working where I currently do. Winter is only 4 weeks, however, so Spring is when I’ll be taking 4 courses(possibly more). Depending on what I test into(studying majorly over winter), I’ll be taking the highest math class I can and hopefully co-requisiting calculus with Computer Science I. I’ll also be taking Earth and Space science(for my non-lab science credit) and English 122. Possibly the only interesting class of the quarter will be spent taking Network Intrusion Detection Systems, which’ll just basically show me how to use various popular IDS’ on the market today. Hopefully I’ll have a teaher who has a proper comprehension of his curriculum in his round of technology-related courses.

Building a new computer

So I’m thinking of saving up a couple months paychecks + christmas + birthday money, and splurging on a new rig. 

Current specs are a little tedious, since I haven’t had a real chance to research -everything- going into it, but:

Intel Core2Duo E8000 series(or if the nehalems are badass enough and cheap enough, one of those)

LGA 775 Mobo with either an x48 or 780i northbridge. Unless new ones come out. Definitely got to be SLi ready, and either DDR3@1600+Mhz or DDR2@800MHz+ compliant. An 8GB cap on RAM is the minimum I’ll accept. Probably going to grab an Ultra120 cooler for this – with either an UltraKaze 120mm 130CFM fan or one of those fabled 120mm 200+CFM fans. I dunno if I can trust the specs on those – that’s a ridiculous amount of air to push in a minute. They’re rightfully loud as all hell, however.

Video cards are probably what I’ll spend the most time researching, since I spend so much time playing games, and one of the primary driving factors behind this decision to build a new computer is so that I can play the latest games for the next few years on the highest settings possible. ATi recently just put out a card that beats nVidia’s top-of-the-line card hands down in everything, however it’s 100$ more. We’ll see where this goes. I’ll either go with 2xGTX280’s or 2×4870x2’s.

I’ll need some badass RAM, but I won’t go into much detail here because there is no clear leader in the memory market.

I’d love one of those newefangled Intel X25-M or X25-E SSD’s – except their 600$ for an 80GB drive. But they beat out every other drive on the market by a wide margin – impressive performance. Most people don’t even realize the kind of performance gains a faster hard drive can give them. This would be an ideal boot drive, but if I can’t afford one, I’ll opt for another SSD with insane read speeds or a WD VelociRaptor. For mass storage I’ll take the drives I currently have(2×320GB 7200RPM Seagate and Samsung) and probably drop an extra 200$ on two 1TB drives. Hopefully I won’t fill up that amount of space for a while

Powering all of this is going to be tough. A powersupply putting out at least 600W of power(more, probably) is required – and one that won’t die with extreme use. I’ll need to catch up on reviews of power supplies in this range to pick out the best.

I’ve been comparison shopping cases, and so far haven’t found any decent reviews of cases. The Antec 900/1200 models look nice, as do some coolermaster models(the Stacker is _beast_, as is the Cosmos).

All in all, it’ll be fun to see where this goes, and when I’m done I can resume e-penis wagging since I’ll have one of the best machines out there. Who knows, I may even get into overclocking :3