So, over the past month or so of doing the Longhorn Server Roadshow, I came to the conclusion that my current Laptop (an Inspiron 9300) just isn't that portable. Of course, I didn't really buy it to be _that_ portable. I actually bought it because I was really in the mode of using a Laptop 2 years ago, and it was one of the few laptops on the market with a PCIe Video Card with 256MB of RAM.

That, and the 17" monitor have caused me to jokingly refer to it as a my "Kitchen Sink Laptop" (i.e. it's not just a desktop replacement - it has everything, including the kitchen sink).

But given that I put so much effort into finding a Laptop with a killer Video setup, I've done some soul searching over the past 2 months, and come to conclusion that Laptops suck. At least desktop replacement laptops do. For me anyhow. (They're great in the right scenarios, but for a guy that sometimes goes almost an entire week without leaving the house, their 'portability' severely offsets their extensibility.)

Therefore I've decided upon 2 things:
1) To ditch my laptop in favor of a Desktop. With a Desktop I can swap out video cards and upgrade key components for a while (provided I buy a killer setup in the first place).
2) If I end up being on the road again, I'm just going to buy a Mac Book. One of the cheaper (non Mac Book Pro) ones, but a Mac Book none-the-less. The Parallels folks have done INSANE things with the Mac Book, making it so that you can transparently run Vista and XP via virtualization right along-side OS X.

As for my new box, I'm super excited about it. It was really designed with two principles in mind:
1) Gaming. I like games, period and want a box that can keep up with FPSes and other games that I might be interested in. (I typically only play during lunch and occasionally at night or on a weekend, but hey... playing is a nice diversion and keeps me sane.)
2) Economics. Buying a gaming 'box' is a blast. And a box that will do really well with games will do VERY well for work. But there's a happy medium between $$ and performance. Yes, I could run out and buy the latest Quad Core processor from Intel along with 2 absolute top-of-the-line video cards. But that Quad Core processor would run around $500-$600, and each Video Cards would run me around $850 each (although at that point we're talking about WATER-COOLED video cards which is so damned cool that it's not funny). And when it comes to components, the 80/20 rule almost works - meaning that you can get almost 80% of the top-most performance by spending 20% of the top-line price. (Although in this case it's more like an 80/35 rule... but go figure).

At any rate, that means that instead of buying the absolute top-end components, I just made sure to buy a motherboard that could easily support those components (and then some), and then went with components that were a few 'steps down' from the absolute top-end.

As such, I ended up with:
- An EVGA Mainboard, using Nvidia's 680i SLI chipset for the northbridge. (This mainboard/motherboard is insane, it's got 2x PCIe x 16 connectors, along with a third PCIe x16 (with only 8 channels) slot for either a third video-card or a physics card. It also has onboard RAID controllers, dual gigabit NICs, and SATA connectors out the wazooo. It also uses the Intel LGA 775 Socket, meaning that I can stuff a Quad Core in there later as they become cheaper and once my software can actually begin to legitimately take advantage of that many cores (until then I've still got my server).)
- A Pentium Core 2 Duo E6600. This processor hits a sweet spot. 2 cores, doesn't draw a ton of power, and shares a whopping 4MB of L2 cache between the cores.
- 2 (yes two) EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS Video Cards with 320MB of RAM each. With two of these puppies I'll be able to team them in an SLI configuration if I ever feel the need, but I'll also have the ability to support up to 4 widescreen monitors simultaneously. (With the right 'splitter' hardware I could actually run with 8 monitors if they were all running 1280x1024.. which is obscene.) I did a lot of research on these video cards, and I'm excited to see how well they'll perform - even without SLI. (It's sickening - in a good way - that these video cards are much, much, much more powerful than some of the computers I've owned.)
- A sweet case. (I also snagged some cable sleeves and a UV-emitting cathodes to kick out some sweet color/tweaks. Yes, I can see myself DEFINITELY getting into wasting time with modding my case (if I could ever FIND the time).)

- RAM. (I probably should have snagged some explicitly SLI rated RAM but I got sick of scrutinizing EVERY component... and just decided to order).
- Other crap, like CD/DVD and a power source capable of handling all of my needs.

For drives I'll just be cannibalizing some of my WD Caviar 7200 RPM drives out of my Server. They're very nice drives with SATA 300 throughput, and will work nicely in a RAID 0 on my new box. Once vendors finally provide some 10K disks with SATA 300 throughput I'll grab one or two of them and slap them in my box as an upgrade.

If you're interested in any of the gory details, all of the specifics can be found on my wishlist at Newegg.com. And for the record, just let me state how much I love NewEgg. I shopped around for my main components with this box - NewEgg had the lowest price on everything but RAM (Buy.com had some cheaper RAM, but I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon that order from them).

In fact, speaking of pricing, this rig was a pretty good deal. It ended up being a little under $1600 (throw in another $100-$200 if you wanted to add disk) with an other Dell 2007WFP 20" Widescreen monitor. All of which is obscenely cheaper than if you tried to make a comparable box with the likes of Dell or AlienWare. (Yes, I know they're the same-ish.)

Expect some images of my box once it's all put together and pimped out with 'neon' cabling and such. (Assuming, of course, that I don't go batty tracking 4 packages until everything gets here (2 packages from NewEgg, an Monitor from Dell, and mod supplies from Case-Mods.com.)