Well well well! To start off my blog properly I thought I would give the low down on the hardware and software I use for easy reference for anyone interested. We’ll start with the hardware:
- ASUS Sabertooth 990FX (v1) motherboard
- AMD FX-6100 Bulldozer processor @ 3.3GHz
- 8GB Corsair Vengeance RAM @ 1600MHz
- ASUS Radeon 6850 HD DirectCU2 1GB graphics card
- Corsair TX650 PSU
- Antec 300 case
Everything has been left on stock settings for now, as its more than fast enough for anything I’ve thrown at it so far. It was a new build, and a marked improvement from my single core 2.2GHz Athlon with 1GB RAM I had before! I stretched the budget for the Sabertooth 990FX because of its extensive future proof features (the damn thing can hold 32GB of 1866Mhz RAM for example!) and it will also be compatible with the new Piledriver processors that are beginning to come to market. I understood the Bulldozer range of CPU’s disappointed a lot of folks, but after having bought one I can’t complain myself.
SOFTWARE
I’m a big supporter of Linux and its ideals, and have used one distro or another for the last 6 years. I started with Ubuntu back when GNOME 2 was all the rage, then I tried its KDE alternative Kubuntu. I found it very heavy on system resources and eventually my search led me to Arch Linux with the Openbox window manager. I was happy for a while (its ridiculously fast) but after much updating, the amount of maintenance and breakages were giving me a headache. It did give me a taste for the bleeding edge version of my favourite programs though! For general computer usage nearly any of the easy-to-use ones are fine, but after finally getting a computer that I can use properly for creative projects I made a mental list of the things I wanted from it:
- Low maintenance
- Stability
- Latest application versions (Krita, GIMP, Blender, Hugin etc)
- Fast and responsive
- KDE
Now first off, I’ve never been much of a KDE fan but since the amazing program Krita arrived and natively runs with KDE I thought I would give working in it a shot. To my surprise I actually love it now after getting to grips with it! It is much heavier on resources than others, but my computer is well capable of handling it. After a good long test I finally settled on Sabayon 10 (desktop shown above). It is a rolling release, never have to wait longer than a week or 2 for the newest versions, is fast enough to work on high resolution images and 2 months in there have been no issues with it so far!
Anyway this post got much longer than I thought it would. Enough of this I’m off to draw something! 
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