Linux

This would be our last custom PC after the first one bought in France in 1997 and the second one bought in Mauritius in 2003. We purchased the following components:

• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3000+
• Motherboard: Abit KV8 Pro
• RAM: 2Gb
• Storage: 160Gb HD
• Video: Inno3D Nvidia GeForce FX 5200
• Audio: Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96

For the first time ever, I had a 64-bits processor, the fantastic AMD Athlon 64 with AMD64 technology. The processor would boot into 32-bits mode and Linux would transition it to 64-bits where it became a completely different (and much better) processor. In fact, Intel would license the AMD64 technology after some time. At that time, I was running Gentoo Linux in 64-bits mode and it rocked!

I also had a whopping 2Gb of RAM which was a lot for the era.

I purchased the Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 to run X-Plane 9 under Linux and it worked really great on the PC (and also on the iMac I would buy a few years later).

Finally, the PC also had a Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96 which was a professional audio interface. It came with a break out box which took one bay of the computer. This had a number of connectors including audio ins and outs (in both analog and digital), a microphone number (with a good preamp), a headphone out and two MIDI ports (which I used with my trusty Kawai K4 synthesizer). I remember paying a large chunk of money to purchase the Terratec but I had a great time composing music using it.

I sold the Terratec to a friend of my brother-in-law when I moved to an Apple iMac in 2011 and, shortly after, purchased a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (which is still running great!)

We used our first PC bought in France for some time (with a new hard disk of course) and, five years after returning to Mauritius, decided to upgrade. I bought components from a shop in Port-Louis which does not seem to exist anymore (Professional Computers) and I got:

• Processor: AMD Athlon XP 1800+
• Motherboard: Asus A7V333
• RAM: 256Mb
• Storage: Maxtor 80Gb HD
• Video: Inno3D Nvidia MX440 64Mb + InnoDV DV1000LE
• Audio: Zoltrix Nightingale Pro 6

The processor was still an AMD but, instead of getting a K6, I upgraded to an Athlon XP aka a K7. The AMD processors were still so much better than anything Intel had at the time. They were more efficient despite running at lower frequencies and I loved the architecture. As a computer scientist with some computer engineering background, I could appreciate how good the AMD designers were.

I remember having a dual boot system with Windows XP and, probably, Ubuntu or Mint Linux.

We opted for an MX440 graphics card which was, in fact, an Nvidia Geforce 4 MX. I remember that the graphics performance were not fantastic (short of the real Geforce (non-MX) 4) but the card was cheap and, at that time, I had started to play less and use my computer more for music, programming and the web. I didn’t really need top-notch graphics performance.

But I still purchased an InnoDV add-on card to provide a Firewire port to the computer. I used that port to transfer videos in DV format (720 x 576) from my Sony DCR-TRV18 camcorder to the computer for editing. USB was not used for video at that time. The software I used for video editing was Sony Vegas and TMPEGEnc for encoding the rendered videos into H264 (a video codec which was quite new at the time). Interestingly, I would trade the camcorder for an Ethernet switch a few years later after moving to Full HD video…

I was still making music but I settled on the Zoltrix Nightingale Pro 6, a very cheap audio card, which, for some reason, contained a very good audio chipset, the C-Media CMI8738. At that time, I had just discovered software instruments such as mda Piano and Crystal and they worked fine on the card.