I am personally a bit of a geek and I seem to enjoy wasting my money on completely unnecessary hardware. I also follow the belief that more screen real estate = more productivity. I also believe that a good PC (or Mac etc) helps productivity by reducing load times and allowing multiple applications to be open at one.
So what do all the Internet Marketing types out there use?
Mine is a little over the top as I spend most of my day on the net rather than hardware intensive tasks anyway here is my setup:
Forgive me if the picture quality was poor, it was taken on my Nokia E90. Also forgive the mess, that is actually after I tidied up a little. I am a chronically messy person.
Anyway I have a 2 PC - 3 monitor setup.
The first PC is my main work PC and uses 2 x 24″ Monitors. 24″ Prices have plummeted the past year in the UK, so they are quite affordable. The Black one is an OCuk Value (DGM branded) and the other is from Scan and is a Acer screen, I can’t remember it’s model number. I am not a monitor geek but I believe the OCuk one is a PVA panel and the Acer is a TN panel. PVAs are better, but I am just happy with lots of screen real estate.
The PC itself is self built and consists of:
- Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 - Overclocked to 3Ghz most of the time.
- Asus Striker II Formula nForce 780i - Possibley the biggest mistake I made, it is a good Mobo, but it is a little temperamental and it runs HOT. I only use 1 GFX card so I should of gone with a different chipset really. Oh well you live and learn.
- Kingston HyperX 2GB (2×1GB) DDR2 PC2-9600C5 1200MHz Dual Channel Kit. Probably another mistake, I think it is the fastest DDR2 on the market, but you need to OC your CPU loads to make the most of it.
- BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI
- Western Digital 150GB 10000RPM - I think this has been superceded by the Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 10000RPM SATA-II 16MB Cache
- Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA-II - Not 100% if this is the correct drive, but it is a 1Tb Western Digital
- Coolermaster RC-1000 Cosmos - Bloody awesome case, I had second thoughts at first because I thought it looked crap in the pictures but it is actually quite nice, it is also huge so easy to work with. But you will not move it around much, I think my girlfriend weighs less than this.
- Tagan TG900-BZ 900w - Really nice modular PSU. The build quality seems great.
- Noctua NH-U12P CPU Cooler - Great cooler, but pretty big. Nice and quiet too.
- Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard - Nice keyboard but I really don’t use half of its features.
Razer DeathAdder Blue 1800dpi - Awsome mouse, I find it much nicer than my Logitech G5 at home.
The Second PC is more of a server/media/spare pc. I mainly use it for music, emails, and I also use it as the PC I keep my Google account logged into (my work one I stay logged out). It has all my client sites installed along with MYSQL, MSSQL, IIS so I can use it as a test server.
- It has a 19″ monitor
- 3800 X2 939 AMD CPU
- Generic Mobo
- 3 Gig generic DDR1 ram
- 7800 GT GFX Card
- 2 x 500 GB HD
- 1 x 40 GB HD (an old spare one)
- Logitech MX518
I don’t have a keyboard on the 2nd PC as I use Synergy to share my main Keyboard and Mouse over IP.
The network is handled by
- Draytek Vigor 2820 Firewall VPN ADSL 2+ Annex M Router using 24Meg Be Broadband (connects at 18 meg)
- NETGEAR GS116 ProSafe 16-Port Unmanaged Gigabit Ethernet Switch
Ideally I would like to get more ADSL lines in as I use a VOIP PBX for phones so would like to maintain the call quality, and more ADSL lines = less traffic coming from one IP.
I do use Tor/Foxy Proxy for firefox and also Xerobank in case I do anything that may create a lot of requests to Google.
Anyway this was meant to be a short fun post that got a little carried away.
So what does everyone else use?
