Thank you Gud!

Get out the drool buckets: 24.5-megapixel Nikon D3X announced, super DSLR is company's latest flagship

Nikon's highest-end digital SLR cameras just got a new big brother, and his name is D3X. There's no fancy HD video shooting here — just raw, unadulterated power with 24.5 megapixels under the hood of this hefty, $8000 behemoth. And that steep price is just for the body, lenses not included.

Aimed squarely at pros whose haunts usually include fancy photo studios and major press events, the camera's flagship features give pros that super-high resolution in the full-frame FX format they crave. It can snap off five of those big frames per second at ISO speeds of 100-1600, expandable to 50-6400. And get this: if you shoot in RAW format, one pic will take up 138MB.

Why should we care? Expect the Nikon D3X's super features and ultimate quality to trickle down to cameras within the range of normal people, and look for those cameras to someday include coveted features such as the D3X's EXPEED image processing system

::blinks::

Whoa.

Looking for PC advice:

My current primary desktop PC ~4 years old and has been acting up lately (really sluggish, crashing more than it should, etc.). I'm thinking of using this as an excuse to buy a new one.

I'm perfectly willing to buy parts and build my own (I've done it before). The current one has an Abit KV-80 motherboard with an AMD ATHLON 64 2800+ CPU. I picked these because they were priced at what I'd call a "sweet spot" -- the top of the line before the price started going up dramatically. The thing is, I've no idea where the sweet spot is today. I use it for some beefy sound editing and photoshop stuff, so processor & memory speed are important.

Any suggestions?

NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer?

Get your own supercomputer. Experience cluster level computing performance—up to 250 times faster than standard PCs and workstations—right at your desk. The NVIDIA® Tesla™ Personal Supercomputer is based on the revolutionary NVIDIA® CUDA™ parallel computing architecture and powered by up to 960 parallel processing cores.

Starting at $9,995. Hey, remember when regular computers cost $4000?

Sorry. But it makes me wonder - when is this technology...

NVIDIA CUDA™ technology is the world’s only C language environment that enables programmers and developers to write software to solve complex computational problems in a fraction of the time by tapping into the many-core parallel processing power of GPUs. With millions of CUDA-capable GPUs already deployed, thousands of software programmers are already using the free CUDA software tools to accelerate applications—from video and audio encoding to oil and gas exploration, product design, medical imaging, and scientific research.

...going to become mainstream? (For high-power stuff like video and graphics, anyway)

Are people familiar with this? GPUs (found in graphics cards) are actually far more powerful than CPUs, because they're optimized to perform the same calculations on huge chunks of data (so they can, for example, rapidly calculate lighting, shadows, etc. in video games.) A lot of computing wouldn't benefit from this approach, but stuff that can be parallelized like video processing, scientific calculations and computer modeling can really perform much faster.

Based on stuff I use, I would probably go this way.

Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor - Retail [link]

GIGABYTE GA-EG41M-S2H LGA 775 Intel G41 HDMI Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail [link]

COOLER MASTER Elite 330 RC-330-KKN1-GP Black SECC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail [link]

COOLER MASTER eXtreme Power Plus RS-460-PMSR-A3 460W ATX12V V2.3 Power Supply - Retail [link]

G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Retail [link]

Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM [link]

SAMSUNG Black 22X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 16X DVD+R DL 22X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA 22X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe - OEM [link]

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit English for System Builders 1pk DSP OEI DVD - OEM [link]

Total Price: $588.92 without the shipping costs. Maybe about $650 with.

The OS is mighty subjective, but a 64 bit OS will let you use all 4GB of RAM instead of 3GB. Audio, Video, and Ethernet are on the board.

I would research very carefully before trying to do sound editing on Vista.

Thanks, Gud! I'll sort through those recs forthwith.

I would research very carefully before trying to do sound editing on Vista.

Oh, yeah, I'm sticking with XP for now. Does that mean I'd be limited to 3GB of RAM?

Yes, with 32 bits you would think it would be 4GB, but in practice it turns out to be 3GB. There is a 64-bit version of XP out there, but there are serious compatibility issues with it.

Can I still use the two 2GB sticks? The other option would be three 1GB sticks, but I can't imagine this costing less than your $40 kit.

Also, I'll be attaching 3-4 hard drives and two DVD/CDR drives. Can the PS you recommended handle that?