I’ve been toying around with potential desktop computer configurations again. I love my Thinkpad but the screen is way too small, and there’s not nearly enough hard drive space. It’s got decent-enough specs (2GB RAM and a dual-core 1.83 GHz processor), though an upgrade’s always nice. So I’ve been toying with various configurations online, trying to stay around the $1,000 mark, including monitors.

I’m looking almost exclusively at the quad-core processors Intel produces, and what I’m finding in the reviews of Newegg is that they’re all capable of being tremendously overclocked. I think the Q9300 is the best bet right now: quad cores at 2.5 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, and a 6MB L2 cache. At $250, it’s only $60 more than the Q6600, probably the most popular of the quad-core chips, but with a slower 1066 MHz FSB. I think the key in assembling a new system is to go for “leading edge, but not bleeding edge.” I can easily sink $1,000 into the latest and greatest “Extreme” processor, but, especially for what I do, it would just barely exceed something like the Q9300.

The other thing to consider is that, even though the Q9300 “only” has four 2.5 GHz cores (for a net of 10 GHz, even though adding them like that is probably improper), it seems that it will very easily overclock; from what I’ve seen, 3.2 and 3.6 GHz are both easy to obtain with anything in this family. All of the reviews, though, recommend a better heatsink for the processors, whether or not you’re overclocking. So that much was a no-brainer.

But I just ran into a “positive review” of the Q9300, saying that, if you water-cool* it, it runs very cool. And I’m not sure how to take that. Isn’t it like saying that, if you attach a rocket booster to a Ford Escort, it’s a very fast car? The more I think about it, the more puzzled I am. Of course it runs cool water-cooled. About the only thing better would be if you were one of those people who use liquid nitrogen to cool your processor.

* For the unitiated, “water cooling” refers to pumping water through copper pipes to dissipate heat off a processor, instead of the normal crappy little heatsink with a 75-cent fan. It’s quite extreme, and generally only used by people pushing their computer to its limits. It has nothing to do with spraying water on your processor to cool it, which is a very bad idea.