New PC, old components

As a graphic designer, I work with various multimedia tools on a daily basis. Of course there's the typical design tools like Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver and Flash. But I also work with encoding video for web streaming and use a variety of tools, such as Flash Video Encoder, On2 Flix, and Procoder. So when my 3-year-old PC (yes I do a majority of my design work on a PC), started showing its age by taking 5 whole minutes to add filters to a 400MB file in Photoshop, or taking 2 hours to encode a 15-minute video, I felt it was time to upgrade.

Having had great experiences with Dell, I thought I would buy a new one from them. I would buy one with an Core 2 Duo CPU with 4GB of RAM. To save money, I planned to configure the machine to have a small hard drive then add my old hard drives into the new machine. Likewise, I would configure the new machine to have a basic CD-ROM Drive, then install my existing DVD burner into the new machine. Brilliant.

Luckily I had a chance to take a look inside a new Dell machine before I placed my order. Inside a Dell Dimension desktop, which I was about to buy. The machine I saw was an Athlon 64 X2, so not exactly the same as what I was planning on buying. Nonetheless, I noticed that inside this Dell Athlon machine, there were no Parallel ATA (IDE) ports. Everything was SATA (Serial ATA). Not only that, internal power plugs were scarce. There were 1 3.5" floppy power, 2 SATA, and 1 traditional connectors. This was a problem. All of my old hard drives were using the old Parallel ATA standard. Even if I were able to connect Parallel ATA, I wouldn't have enough power plugs for all of them.

I immediately scrapped my plans to buy a Dell. Instead I decided to buy parts to build my own. I calculated the cost of all the parts, and it came out to be about the same as buying a brand new Dell. But, I was able to outfit my new PC with better components and a motherboard that can support parallel ATA drives.

More on my upgrade coming soon.