Before the recent events in my life I decided it was time for me to have a new computer at home, its a work PC but has mixed use as my wife also uses it and I like to occasionally play games.

I’ve worked professionally with computers for over ten years and during that time I have never owned a new high specification machine, only patch up computers that you pick up from here and there.

So here is my new machine, its not over the top and was quite affordable but powerful and more than under the hood to make Vista feel like XP in the performance department;

AMD Phenom 9600, 2.4Ghz Quad Core

4GB Dual Channel 1066 FSB Memory (2x2GB)

ATI Radeon HD3800 x2

So far, apart from a small issue which was resolved with a bios update I’ve been really pleased. I have 64bit Windows Vista Ultimate (SP1) installed and it runs very well with no hangs or disk thrashing in sight. The Vista experience index is 5.9 which is the maximum achievable.

What really sets my PC apart from other high specification machines though is the hard drive. Its a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drive from Seagate which runs at 15,000rpm. SAS is a relatively new technology which hasn’t made it into desktop PC’s yet, its simply comprises of a SCSI hard drive on a SATA 3Gb/s interface but it makes for some excellent read and write times and is a real boost to Vista. My PC boots to a fully usable state in just under 40 seconds, 5 or 6 of which are the SAS controller scanning for the drive. A very respectable boot time I think you will agree.

You really can tell the difference from day to day use and I would highly recommend considering SAS in your next desktop PC, it makes Vista a pleasure to use which is worth the extra pennies in my book.