An IBM Blue Gene /L would blow this thing out of the water it needs for cooling. And the Blue Gene /L can run Linux so it's actually useable by people here without some weirdo special OS only big corporate admins have ever heard of.

360 Teraflops was it?

And even then you don't need to go that far, one fo those big as a fridge Sun bxes would pretty much run circles around it regaurdless of it it was running linux or Solaris.

For home users who want to go all out you have two choices to make someone at a LAN party wet themselves:

An Alienware, which you wouldn't just buy one, you'd of course click on configure, and then upgrade everything to the option that adds money to the total price.

Alienware has a nice website and when you configure a machine before purchase you can configure what you want it to come with. Click on everything that adds to the cost to make it faster and more expensive and basically you'd have almost the same thing.

The next choice is for the Apple Mac users, who there and configure their top fo the line I wet myself because I paid as much for this thing as some people do for their cars buttons, then add all the extras and you have another top fo the line machine.

Not that I'd know exact specs, I can't afford either, and if I could, I'd go mid grade with room for upgrade and concentrate mainly on as much RAM as I can shove in this thing, as much HD space as I can fit, and as fast of a processor as I can make it use with water cooling, HD coolers, a video card cooler, and generally hook up liquid nitrogen to the MOBO.

When I bought my Laptop, I didn't have a lot of money, so I was like OK, I want it to be nice but I can't afford REALLY high end, so I took an Inspiron notebook, and configured it myself from Dell, it was cheap, and the grand total was 1200 dollars.

This is how I did it:

I want a fast processor, what good is a laptop I'm going to use at school if I'm waiting for everything to load up? So I went with a Pentium 4 Mobile at 3.06GHz.

Next was RAM, Most of my machines have 512 MBs and that works fine for me, being a Linux user, that gives me the ability to open 19 instances of Firefox with 10 tabs in each + XMMS playing a huge MP3 playlist while watching a video and ripping a CD and talking on AIM.

So I went with 512, and that only costed a little extra, so now the price was still under a thousand dollars.

Next, I said "OK, this is a laptop, meaning a MOBILE PC, it's not much good if the Battery runs out and so a crap battery defeats the purpose of a laptop I can use without being at home, I want to use it in school, but it's hard to do that if the Battery dies" and so I upgraded the Battery in it to a Lithium Ion, which costed an extra 100 dollars.

I said "OK, now I have a Laptop that's 15 inches, it has a decent amount of RAM, so it's useable, it's got a good processor, so it's good on speed, and it has a nice price tag. It also has a getter battery" and the HD was 30 GBs, which is fine, I have 2 MP3 players and an external HD and a USB DVD / CD burner so I didn't spend extra to make it have a CD or DVD burner, and I left the HD at 30 GBs because I run an FTP server on at least one machine so I can store things there and still have room for a few games, some homework, and even a partition for Linux and Windows to play on the HD without having to delete things all the time.

I also made the HD go farther by uninstalling things I don't use. I have some MP3s on it, a few videos, some pics, Doom, Doom 2, Final Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003, and Wolfenstein, and still have room for software and things I work on.

Now, I have almost 50 gigs of MP3s, and almost the same in movies, so to keep the HD space working for this laptop, I only grabbed MP3s I actually listen to a lot and even allowed a few more for when I want to have a new playlist, for videos, I grabbed a few I like to watch, and downloaded Dawn of the Dead from my FTP server on my desk, and still had like 20 gigs free so I installed Linux, set up an FTP server so I had something to do in class when my friend would bringin a router, we would unhook Cat5 from the PCs in the machine area, set up a mini network, and have fun.

This is a lot of typing, but the thread made me think "hmm, some people may want one of these machines thinking they really need everything top of the line when they don't, maybe I can go over how I went about getting my first laptop, and go over what I did to keep the price down".

The only other thing I paid extra for was the video card. I don't like integrated cards, so I spent the extra money and had it come with an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 GO card, and that works to play the games I actually play and at the same time work out of the box with Linux.

So there you have it, a machine that didn't suck and costed 1200 dollars. If you don't have a bunch of mp3 players or USB drives and don't have a CD or DVD burner on every other machine you own, or don't have a portable one, you still don't have to spend a bunch on the thing.

This was 2 years ago and I still got one of the fastest processors the thing could handle, so you just have to go over what you're ACTUALLY using it for, and go from there.