My hardware environment

I have two computers that I use for my work. One is an x86 laptop, a ThinkPad T42 with a built-in ATI video controller (Mobility Radeon 9600). The other is a quad-core x86_64 box with an NVidia card (GeForce 6600). My work involves a lot of scientific computation, sometimes multi-threaded, and I need hardware-accelerated 3D rendering to analyze the results. So, I'm running on two architectures, with two different video cards.

The laptop is fairly standard, so I won't discuss it further. My big box has the following hardware:

• Intel DP35DP motherboard
• Intel Core2 Quad CPU, Q6600, 2.4GHz per core
  
• 4 GB RAM
• Two 160 GB SATA disks
• One 500 GB SATA disk
• Two 120 GB EIDE disks

I'll discuss later why I have so many hard drives.

Because I sit next to this box all day, I've put a lot of effort into making it quiet. My laptop makes more noise than the big box.