New Hardware, Wee.

I recently put together an ASUS T2-PH2 barebones kit to replace my aging workstation.  Mostly, it was to reduce the physical foot print and to reduce the noise.  The old system had a horribly loud fan and it was a behemoth of a machine for what it had in it.

Worked great, but the install was a bit obnoxiously tight.  It's a small form factor PC (small... understatement, tiny and cramped is a better descriptive) so it was expected, and I eventually got all the hardware in place.  Worked well, was much quieter and I was quite pleased to free up the space.  Unfortunately, I'm also a dumbass and read the wrong socket type so had to go buy a new CPU.  My $120 upgrade ended up running about $300 at that point... but what a nice CPU I picked up :)  I wanted to go dual core for a while, so this was a good excuse to do it.

Got everything up and running and it was nice.  Then it died.  Damn!  Quick googling revealed a common thread on this product line.  Death, Death, Death.  Damn!  The fine folks at newegg promptly processed the RMA and then I was notified that instead of an exchange I would receive a refund (I was past the 30 day period anyway).  So, I'm left without a workstation and $120 in exchange.  Decisions, decisions.

I decide to give Shuttle a try, as I've always seen them but their price tag has always turned me off.  I just wasn't sure if it was worth the extra money, but decided that I should finally find out.  Shuttle G5 barebone kit to the rescue!  It was only $180 more ... only.  I was really hesitant because in my youth I was employed to build computers, and know how cheap you can do it (several of my systems here were $230) but I plunged in and bought it.

Couldn't be happier.  Best little system I've put together in a while.  I'll write up later some funny stories about the install.