Video gamers often bedazzle their computers with fancy running lights, excess fans, and exotic cooling systems.Many video gamers were selling their old systems on the site, but I was leery of those machines for three reasons:

I went in search of computers featuring more than four processor cores, just to see what I could find. I have already mentioned Le Bon Coin, and that was the resource that got my build started. Because many bioinformatics tools benefit from multiple processor cores, a pile of RAM, and a lot of storage, I went in search of an inexpensive used PC as my starting point. Remember, though, that Dave is a thrifty codger who doubts any company’s claim that their stuff is necessary to “ Think Different!” In practice a computer build starts with the motherboard and CPU, and then we decorate it with lovely accessories.

I hoped to dual-boot the machine between Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu Linux, which may be disappointing to users who love Apple products. You might have four cars trying to go through two tunnels, but only two are going to enter the tunnels at once! My ThinkPad has pretty low expansion limits in memory and hard disk space, so transforming it into a heavy hitter seems an expensive and likely unsatisfactory option.īuilding a tower workstation is the route I chose, then. I know that the specifications say it can run 4 threads simultaneously, but the reality is that it has only two cores. Wouldn’t it be nicer to carry that power around with me? Well, my laptop is powered by a Intel i5-6300U, a processor released in the latter half of 2015 (about the time I moved to South Africa). To start at the beginning, we might reasonably ask why I’d build a cumbersome tower rather than beef up my laptop.

Even though we spent January in temporary housing at the Cité Universitaire, I was already moving to build a “real” computer. In moving to France for 2021, all my lovely workstations went into secure storage, and I was accompanied only my my Lenovo ThinkPad T460s. One of the drawbacks of a short-term move to another continent is that all your stuff stays behind! I am an inveterate tinkerer, and no computer can be near me for long without my having poked into its guts at least once.

Bioinformatics workstation 2017 mac pro