My Machine I

PcPerspective (.com) is having a 'competition' to give away 5 nVidia GTX750Ti's.  These cards are what I thought I was getting when I bought a Radeon 7790 last year - good for games, low power, and good for rendering hi-def output from MythTV.

(This was because I took the code drops around VDPAU for the opensource Radeon driver way too literally.  Not having had the forethought to by card five years ago so that support would eventually arrive in the Radeon driver, I am still waiting on VDPAU that is more than a slideshow.  It's been coming for a long time but I've owned this card since July last year. Tracking via Phoronix.com, I would guess the 7790 will be adequately supported and compiled stacks available in the Oibaf repository by Dec this year, but I wouldn't bet much on it.)

The Asus 7790 I bought is pretty great.  Only 1GB of GDDR5 but clocks high enough that its almost a 260X, and TrueAudio on board.  But my gaming time is limited; this machine spends a lot more time running Ubuntu and MythTV, recording and serving up video around the house, particularly on the main screen.  When running Ubuntu, the nVidia blob has been really good for a long time, and lots of things bolt on to it nicely.

As you can see from CPU-z to the left here, I've got an old Athlon x4 620e.  Clearly I'm committed in my way to low power operation.  Not shown - my Antec Earthwatts Platinum, a nice quiet 90% efficient PSU.

In a followup post, I'll put a picture of the beast in its Antec Sonata III case.  The bright blue 'EMU' in the pic is my Emu 1010 with the 0202 daughterboard (Emu 1212 Pcie).

I don't think this is really what the PCPER guys have in mind, and the odds are bound to be very long since its one of the few competitions open internationally.