Rationale-Thought

Building your very own computer can be a real treat. It can also be a lot of work, and really confusing if your not 100% sure of what you’re doing. Once you get started however, you’ll find that it’s pretty fulfilling and can save you a bit of money.

To get started you first need to determine what kind of computer you’re trying to make. Is it a hardcore gaming PC? A budget word processor? High-end multimedia? Once you know what you’re trying for you’ll be able to actually get what you need. For this segment Rationale-Thought decided to attempt to build a high mid-range level computer, which would be Direct X 10 compatible, have various multimedia functions, and function as a total workstation for our various needs while still cutting costs where we could. Bear in mind that you may not need everything included in our build.

Now that we know what we want to build, we’ll have to do a little research and browse around for the components that we’ll use. There’s alot of different sites and companies you can order from, we chose to use Newegg as our primary source.

First things first you should pick out a tower/case that will fit your needs. It’s a good idea to start here, as your case will dictate what sort of motherboard, etc you can use. Once you pick out your case you’ll be sure that everything you get will work for it. Otherwise, you can browse through the various component first and then find a tower that will work for exactly what you want, rather than narrow your search to what your case works for. We decided to take a roomy and sturdy tower with plenty of fans. This turned out to be cool because LED fans can make any tower look great

Our Build:

• RAIDMAX Smilodon Extreme Black ATX-612 Web
  • Price: $79.99

We decided to go with the Intel processor for this build. Although AMD makes reliable chips that can be comparable, for what we were looking for Intel performed higher in all the benchmarks. For our system we decided to try out one of the fancy Quad cores.

Our Build:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz LGA 775
  • Price $274.99

The real heart of any computer is the motherboard. You need to make sure that the motherboard not only has all the USB slots and connections you will need, but is compatible with your CPU and everything else. Make sure to read the reviews of the pro’s and con’s of your motherboard. In our build we decided SLI wasn’t that important, especially with the quality graphics card we went with.

Our Build:

• GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3P Rev 2.0 LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Ultra Durable 2, Ultra Cooling Intel Motherboard
  • Comes with 10 USB ports, window’s vista certified
  • Price: 159.99
• Cons
  • SLI not supported

Your graphics card can be a big deal if you plan on doing any gaming. For many of the newer games you have to have a very high end computer to be able to fully enjoy the visuals. On this note we went with a DirectX 10 compatible graphics card so we can enjoy games like Crysis in all thier glory.

Our Build:

• XFX GeForce 8800GT PVT88PYDF4
  • Price: $269.99

Your systems memory is also another big component. If your making a Vista computer you want to go with at least 2 gigs of memory. In our build we went with a total of 4 gigs in 2 chips. Not only does this give us extra memory to run things such as CAD programs if we desire, but it also gives us room to upgrade if we ever need more.

Our Build:

• OCZ Reaper HPC Edition 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit
  • Price: $115.99

Your Harddrive is another important part of your computer. How much space and the speed at which it writes is all dependent uponr your needs. We went with a 500 gig model, which should provide us plenty of space for the near future. Another great advantage to building a desktop is that adding another hard drive, or simply plugging in a nice external hard drive is not too much work.

Our Build:

• Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 3.5″ SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
  • Price: $99

Naturally in any computer you need a good cd drive. In today’s world though, you can get alot of DVD-roms, not to mention you may want to be able to burn your own movies/files onto disc. This being the case we went with a now standard DVD burner drive. You also want to keep in mind your write speed, etc.

Our Build:

• Pioneer 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black IDE Model DVR-115DBK
  • Price: $29.99

Finally, you need a good power supply to power your nice new computer. Make sure to pick a power supply unit that not only will have enough wattage for your uses, but supplies enough SATA as well, otherwise you may find yourself forced to get adapters. Our system will require an above average wattage, so we went with anything bewteen 500-600 watts

Our Build:

• Broadway Com Corp OKIA-BLACK-550 550W Power Supply
  • Price: $23.99

Conclusions: Our total price came to a total of $1,054.92. All told this price is not too shabby, as a comparable computer that you would order premade could run between 3-4 thousand dollars. Bear in mind that this figure doesn’t include any accessories that you may need to order if you do not have them, including a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. On a system like this we would most likely go with a dual monitor setup, with wireless keyboard and mouse. This could run you several thousand more dollars, mostly for the monitors. All told we have a pretty solid system here. Let us know what you think!

I’ve recently been treating myself to some hours of Ubisoft Montreal’s recently released Assassin’s Creed.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with it it is an action/adventure game set in the holy lands of Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre during the crusades.

Essentially you are an assassin who is charged with eliminating a series of high profile targets throughout the cities.  Actually assassinating those targets requires some work however, as guards and civilians alike get in your way.  To assassinate each victim you must first assemble information on them and determine how best to take them down.  This can require some time if you choose to fulfill each investigation, which this writer has.

Graphically the game is impressive.  The cityscapes look beautiful and don’t skimp on details.  As well there are no noticeable glitches, textures popping out, or anything of the sort.  The game runs a solid frame rate and there is no freezing up or hitches in the picture.

While the game is mildly repetitive as you must progress through similar tasks for each assassination, it is really a joy to play as the tasks are enjoyable no matter how many times you must go through them.

Overall Assassin’s Creed is a definite keeper.  And surely one of the finer games of 2007, which was notorious for its many great games.

Wow, it’s been quite a while since there have been any new posts.  While this blog is a personal blog and gaps in updates are allowed a 2 month break is just unacceptable.  There are a several new content additions that are being played around with currently.  Definitely look out for additions to our C++ tutorial, which will be getting additions towards the end of the month when our programmer is available.  Other than that we are planning to open a new section of our site to an idea that we’ve been playing with for quite some time.  Games have especially been a big interest for us, and in particular RPG’s, or roleplaying games.  To that effect our design team has been fiddling around with efforts on creating our very own and original IP and will get it’s own portion of the site to use.  Because there currently are no patents and copyrights on any of the material much of the innovative, and unique gameplay ideas may be kept of the radar until the rights are secured, but be on the look out and feel free to offer ideas and suggestions to our team!

On another note, if you’re interested in gaming, I found a particularly  interesting piece of Halo 3 news today.  Apparently there have been two sets of the special “Recon” armor that have been given to gamers.  One of which was given to a gamer for sniping himself in the head, which although seemingly impossible apparently can happen.  Footage of the sniping here.  The real news is that this users account was hacked and his rare armor stolen.

Really makes you wonder what the thief was thinking though, if he ever uses it he’s sure to be caught.  For the full story feel free to check out 1up.com’s original article here.

So there haven’t been any new updates the past few weeks. Sorry about that as I’ve been incredibly busy…I’d like to argue that all the hours I’ve spent playing Call of Duty 4, and Mass Effect were going to a very in depth review for this site. Unfortunately they’re just amazing games that I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing. Expect some updates in the near future however, and continued updates on our C++ tutorial

Ran across a pretty interesting article today.  Many of you out there may be familiar with the popular JS-Kit plugins which include: Comments, Reviews, Ratings, Polls, and Top Rated.  These services, excluding Top Rated, are free to use and claim to be very professional, though we’ve yet to take a look at them ourselves. JS-Kit also boasts of being very upgradeable, which can definitly raise it’s appeal to the average webmaster.  Tried out JS-Kit? let us know what you think of their products!

Interested in JS-Kit or a fan of their products?  Check out Simply-Basic.com’s interview with JS-Kit’s CEO.

Thanks for everyone’s patience over the past few days. We’ve gotten our new theme up and working, relocated all of our sites and links, gotten a new form for our contact us page, and added several new word press plugins. In addition to that we’ve added a new author to the Rationale-Thought team. Be looking for his posts, looks like it’s going to be pretty interesting.

After working with wordpress for a while we’ve come across some pretty useful plugins. We thought we’d share some of the ones we use to increase the amount of traffic to our sites. We thought it might be useful to you:

• Another Wordpress Meta Plugin: by some guy
  • This plugin is really easy to use and install on your site. In addition it allows you to place meta tags, that will increase the number of hits your site gets from google and other search engines. This one’s important to start up blogs.
• Google XML Sitemaps: by Arne Brachhold
  • This plugin is another easy to use plugin. This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, which in the end means more visitors to your site
• Sociable: by Peter Harkins
  • This plugin automatically adds social bookmarking to your posts. Now people can digg your sites easily and can bring the good posts to the forefront. Eventually this will mean more traffic on your site
• WP-ShortStat: by Markus Kaemmerer
  • and of course you have to have a plugin that keeps track of all the new traffic your site is receiving

This list is not by any means comprehensive, but it’s a few of them we’ve found most useful. Hope you enjoy!

A little while back we mentioned a free online copy of a book about Ruby On Rails. Well, many of you may be wondering what exactly is Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is a free web application framework. It’s open source, and not surprisingly written in the Ruby programming language. The main benefit of Rails is the scaffolding, which are skeleton code frameworks.

The fundamental Ruby on Rails principles include Convention over Configuration (CoC) and Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY).

“Convention over Configuration” means a developer only needs to specify unconventional aspects of the application. For example, if there’s a class Sale in the model, the corresponding table in the database is called sales by default. It is only if one deviates from this convention, such as calling the table “products_sold”, that one needs to write code regarding these names.

“Don’t repeat yourself” means that information is located in a single, unambiguous place. For example, using Active Record, the developer does not need to specify database column names in class definitions. Instead, Ruby can retrieve this information from the database.

Because of these defaults, Rails is often referred to as “opinionated software”, which has been a point of contention for many critics of Rails.

Ruby on Rails is definitly another of those great development tools that if you get skilled at it you could do alot of impressive work.

We’re in the process of changing our themes around a little, so the site has been a little disorganized today.  If you find that a page or a post has been lost somewhere in the shuffle please let us know!  We’ll take care of that right away.

Another note, for those of you using our ongoing c++ tutorial we had some formatting problems while using wordpress on our past post, if the code for the programs you used did not work, they have been fixed and should work now.

Feel free to tell us what you think of the new theme we’re using!

Another update on our C++ tutorial. Check it out here.

Mac OS 10.5, or Leopard as it’s called, came out just this past week. For those of you hoping, or rather, expecting it to have Java 6 support after Apple nearly stated it would, be prepared to be disappointed. Not only did Leopard come with no Java 6 support, it came without a comment from Apple as to why it was omitted. Most likely because Apple hopes to “listen to feedback” and respond, rather than admit the oversight.

You can imagine this makes development for Macs a tad bit complicated. Especially while Apple has been promoting itself as the major open source platform of the age. While there will most likely be an update in the future that will fix the problem, looks like Apple had another hangup out of the blocks.

Even with this slight trouble Leopard looks like it will add in some neat features. One that looks like it could have some promise is the desktop stacking feature. To quote Apple’s official website “a stack is a Dock item that gives you fast access to a folder of files. When you click a stack, the files within spring from the Dock in a fan or a grid, depending on the number of items”. Leopard looks to capitialize more on aesthetically pleasing elements as well, adding transparent bars and menues, adds features to safari and ichat. Another really neat feature is the Time Machine, which can restore files, folders, and others.

Looks Like Leopard will be pretty neat, just hold your horses on the development side of things.

A new update on our C++ tutorial just went up today. Make sure to check it out!

And I recently became aware that Sitepoint is giving away free online copies of Ruby on Rails book by Patrick Lenz.  Not sure what Ruby on Rails is?  We’ll be looking into it and giving you an update in the future.  Make sure to be wary though, the free copies only last for 60 days.  Check it out here to get your copy.

And for all you enterprising wordpress blogs, make sure never to copy and paste a document from MS Word into your wordpress post/page editor, it really messes with the html formatting code and gets REALLY frustrating to look at and work on.  Believe me, I thought it would be easier to write it in Word and transfer it over until i tried it myself.