ET's Info-Stew

There is one bad thing about Colorado: the closest Fry's Electronics is in Texas. Luckily I recently found something similar to it, Micro Center. There is one that is about 20 minutes away. It is smaller than your typical electronics store, but it is more like a Radio Shack for computers with lots of component parts. They have decent deals probably comparable to Fry's, though you can always find the best deals online. And just walking around the store and listening to how they were helping customers I could tell the staff was very knowledgeable (i.e. geeks). I have a feeling I'll be visiting that store a lot.

Today I started off my Noob Fragger by buying a computer case. I didn't want just any case, I wanted one that would work well for high performance computing. Heat is a big problem with high performance computers, which is why computers have fans. Some may think that fans serve to blow cool air on components to cool them down. Actually the fans in a computer serve to draw warm air away from the components. That's why, for example, you feel air coming out of laptop fans.

Micro Center has some December deals going on, so I was able to purchase the Antec Nine Hundred for $80, which is about $30 cheaper than from Newegg.com. It has pretty good reviews.

It comes with three 120mm fans (two in front, one in back) and one huge 200mm exhaust fan. Two more 120mm fans can be put in if more airflow is needed. In general, all those fans are supposed to really keep the temperature manageable. There are two things I'll have to look out for. One, there isn't a great deal of length (front to back) so the long video cards are going to be snug. Two, the power supply will be mounted on the bottom, which means that the power cords to the motherboard will probably need to reach farther, so that is something to keep in mind when purchasing a power supply.

Here are some of the pictures. Click to see bigger pictures and from there you can click to see all the pictures of the case.