Michael Walker

Azathoth

Outside the ordered universe is that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes...

Azathoth lives! It feels good to be back on a sensible operating system. I built Azathoth for just under £500 (including postage), which I think is pretty good. As an aside, monitors are incredibly expensive, if the spare monitor living under my bed worked, I'd have saved myself over £100.

Azathoth will assimilate the functions of Cthulhu, but with the added memory and processor speed, I imagine I'll be using it for a bit more number crunching; perhaps F@h or something. I picked a microATX case for two reasons: save space in my room, and portability. When I go to university, I can fit the computer, keyboard, and mouse in a backpack. The monitor isn't so transportable, alas. This also means if I want to, say, take it to someone else's house, I can do with relative ease.

Hardware

Case:

Antec Minuet 350

Processor:

AMD Athlon II X2 (3GHz)

Motherboard:

Gigabyte GA-MA78LM-S2 (AM2+ socket)

Memory:

4GB Corsair TwinX DDR2 (1066Hz)

Monitor:

23" Digimate L-2362WD (1920x1080, HD 1080P)

Storage

Recycled HDD from Cthulhu; 250GB SATA

I also bought a slew of cables and other little bits and pieces.

Post-construction notes

There were a few issues upon booting up as, well, Arch expected to be on a laptop. However, despite having completely different hardware, the only thing to fail utterly was Xorg, and that was my fault. As soon as I removed my xorg.conf, it started up fine, at the screen's native resolution of 1920x1080 (incredible). I was pretty impressed with Arch's ability to handle massive hardware changes with so few complaints.

Whilst I was trapped in Windows-land, linux 2.6.33 was released to Archers through testing which, amongst other things I haven't really noticed yet (:P), works perfectly with early-start radeon KMS; do you know how amazing a 1920x1080 framebuffer appearing as soon as Arch starts to boot is? It's most amazing.

In addition to graphics being wonderful, this motherboard is pretty great, too. Support for up to 8GB of RAM and 12 USB ports should keep me happy for several years to come. The only thing I'm (slightly) worried about is USB 3.0, which could become pretty widespread over the next few years, possibly meaning I'd need to get a USB 3-capable motherboard to keep up with new peripherals. One thing I do miss from Cthulhu is the SD card reader, I've ordered a USB one, but until that arrives I'll be a bit stuck if I need to read any SD cards which, thankfully, isn't a very common occurrence.

Photos