I recently decided to release my 24″ iMac to my Wife for her photography work, thus leaving me without a decent workstation. Sure I could fire up that old OS/2 Warp (E-Comstation) machine that is collecting dust somewhere in the basement, but I decided it was time to get a serious Linux workstation (Rather than running off a MacOS VMWare Fusion instance). So as any one would do, a price hunt ensued to find the best deal. Sure, I’ve built machines hundreds of times over my career (desktops & servers), but being a bit out of touch with hardware specs, I decided to but pre-built. In my search on places like NewEgg, Costco, ZipZoomFly, Amazon, and even HP.com, I came across CyberPowerPC. A custom PC builder based out of Cali. I started toying with their Online Custom Configurator (much like one would when shopping for a new car). I was able to select components down to the manufacturer in most cases. they have an excellent selection of Cases, Cooling, Power Supplies, accessories, and so on. In fact, I think I spent about 4 days looking and tweaking the config until I had a pretty good idea of what I thought I wanted. Because of the amount of time you could spend tweaking, they are kind enough to provide a “Save Configuration” button. Now intersetingly enough, this Save button apparently also emails the configuration to an employee at CyberPower, who is nice enough to review your specs for any incompatabilities or conflicts, but also is available to ask any Pre-Sales questions.

Now that my specs were certified in pre-sales, and I took the opportunity to ask some questions, I shopped a few more places and even priced out the same parts at NewEgg for a DIY comparison. I found the price difference to be negligable and appreciated the added comfort of professional builds and company backed warranty. Order Placed!

During the post-sales pricing, the order status page is very detailed and keeps you informed as to which phase your system is in. I was contacted once prior to the assembly by my Sales rep who informed me about a backorder on a component and asked if I wanted an alternate. I took this time to upgrade the video cards as well. Something you probably can’t get at Dell. He indicated he was hoping to get it shipped out by the end of the week. Indeed it was.

Upon arrival, the system was packaged very neat and tight inside the box. The unveling revealed a very well built system overall. There was a minor issue with 2 case fans. One was loose in the chassis and required a minor reseat, the other was not cabled into the fan controller because of the shipping foam used inside the case to prevent shifting. All in all, a very excellent piece of equipment, great service, and lots of cool extras. I highly recommend shopping at CyberPowerPC.com before you go anywhere else.

So you are asking, what OS did you install on it? ArchLinux of course! The system does dual boot Windows-7 as well, strictly for hardware management (firmware flashes) and future gaming. But as of right now, its running KDE 4.3.2 on ArchLinux.