What Would Be Your Dream Machine?

isaachulvey asks: "If you could put together your dream machine with any components you want, what would it be? Obviously price is not a factor here or we'd all be putting together 800 MHz systems with 128 MB of RAM. This is your dream machine, so be creative, go as over the top as you need, remember overkill is not a crime."

C= 64

[thhamm]

i want my C64 back. and the whole bunch of good memories too.

Depends on your requirements

[hcdejong]

Sure, it'd be fun to have the fastest computer available, but lots of power comes with drawbacks: noise and high electricity bills.

My main machine is a Mac Mini G4, and you know, it's fast enough for just about everything I do. It's nice and quiet, and doesn't draw ludicrous amounts of power. The only drawback is its lack of room for internal harddisks. I've got two external disks connected for a total of 500 GB, and I still don't have enough space.

I'm shopping for a PVR at the moment. AFAIK, any current machine would do for this purpose; the only thing that may pose a problem is HDTV playback. But given the lack of HDTV broadcasts where I live, this wouldn't be a dealbreaker.

My work machine could do with a bit more power, but in my job (writing technical documents), the CPU rarely is the bottleneck. Disk speed is more of an issue. I just replaced the 4200 rpm disk in my laptop with a 7200 rpm disk, and the difference is quite remarkable.
My ultimate work machine would be a laptop with 4 GB RAM on the fastest bus available [1], a RAID-0 using four of the fastest drives available [1], a 15" internal screen and 2 DVI ports that can drive a 30" screen each. Then again, with that RAID it wouldn't be very portable.

1: note the lack of technicalities. I've no idea which speeds we'd be talking about. Mostly, I just don't care enough to keep up.

a man of modest needs.

[the_greywolf]

What I want in a "dream machine" laptop is modest, at best.

• 13" - 14.1" display. I really don't want anything larger, and anything smaller is a PDA.
• 80+ GB 1.8" or 2.5" hard drive. These days, anything smaller is unreasonable, but anything larger, and that's what USB storage is for. :P
• 802.11g, or n when it matures. What I'm describing is a mobile workstation, so I want to take it literally anywhere.
• Extremely low-power CPU with a reasonably high clock (1GHz or more). I'm looking for 9-hour battery performance, under a modest load. ARM seems to fit the bill, but I'd like to see something a little more powerful. A low-end OpenSPARC maybe? x86 is out of the question.
• Low-power 3D accelerator. 3D programming is a hobby of mine, so I want that capability. Low-power profile GPU, with modest 3D power: Equivalent to a GeForce Go 6600, but with an open architecture and Free specs, and easily able to handle a ported version of Folding@Home for GPUs when hooked up to AC power and put in a standby mode. (Read: I don't care how much power it burns in 3D mode, but 2D mode has to use a trickle of power.)
• USB and Firewire - for everything else.

Why can't I get that kind of thing in a laptop computer? Why do I have to move up to 17" desktop replacements to get a usable 3D GPU? Why is the Core CPU always paired with the industry's biggest joke in 3D graphics (the GMA9x0)? Why is battery life still stuck at 3 to 4 hours? The mobile market has had more than enough time to develop beyond that, and it has thus far failed.