[johnblommers]

Yes, all of my very good PC-loving friends have encouraged me to toss out all of my old PC hardware and just go build one from new parts. Building PCs is a good experience, but I basically took a bunch of on-hand PCs and took the best parts out of them to do this.

The point of building a computer is to learn stuff. I am not interested in a sub $1000 piece of hardware however, for little will be learned.

I want a machine with a dual processor motherboard able to support 64-bit AMD CPUs. It needs a kicking video card, a gigabit ethernet card, firewire, optical audio, and it must be able to accomodate at least 8Gig of RAM.

My DP G5 is such a machine of course, but to gain broad experience and learn at building the computer from scratch you have to go Intel-compatible.

This is crazy high end stuff, I know, and it will cost about $2500 buy the parts to build it. I've speced out the parts already. At least the 64-bit Linux software is available in serveral distributions.

But this is where the frontier lies. This is where it's really fun and interesting. This is how we learn. You learn at the cutting edge.

The reason I am involved in the Serene Screen boards is because the Marine Aquarium and Goldfish Aquarium products are cutting-edge, which draws a very smart and outspoken crowd. I have learned quite a bit by engaging the good folks who participate in these forums. I hope the readership agrees.