Rory's Christmas shopping: Most expensive computer?

By Rory Reid on 23 December 2005, 10:48am

With all my Crave money spent, I've been promised one more Christmas present, (virtual) money no object. I've been a pretty good boy this year, so Santa owes me big. This is especially true since the bloated, greying old schmuck has ignored my letters requesting a Lamborghini Diablo for the past 20 years.

I'm a little older and wiser now, and have come to the realisation that a Diablo simply wouldn't be useful in London. Not only would it get scratched by deviant children, but I don't think Italy's finest is fast enough to evade Ken Livingstone's array of congestion charge cameras.

With this in mind, I've decided that my ultimate Santa gift should be a little more practical, so I've gone for the Sun Fire E25K Server -- Large edition. Nick Hide's awesome Alienware PC is a true gaming monster, but when it comes to raw computing horsepower, the E25K is like a 100-strong herd of steroid-addled stallions pulling a chariot made of Styrofoam. Being driven by a cockroach. If it was a car, it'd make the Diablo look like a wind-up toy tractor.

It has 72 (yes, that's seventy-two) separate UltraSPARC IV+ processors running at 1.5GHz each. Each has a quite unfathomable 32MB of L3 cache memory -- the fastest Pentium 4 has just 2MB of L3 cache in comparison. Then there's the memory -- there's 288GB of the stuff. That's a lot.

The machine's a little out of my budget, but should Santa's elves not have the skills to rustle one up, they can buy one direct from Sun Microsystems for a reasonable $3,520,142 (£2,023,419) .

What am I actually going to do with it? Well it doesn't have a gaming graphics card, so it can't play Battlefield 2. And it doesn't come with a keyboard, so I can't actually type with it. That leaves just one logical thing: I'll put it in a glass display case, invite all my friends round and we can all just stare at it.

Are you listening, Santa? -Rory Reid

Rory has bought these items:
Motorola V3i (D&G) and Limousine ride
Followit Personal Tracking Bundle
O2 Pay-as-you-go SIM Card
Locator PC Software
VT8 4x2 touchscreen stand
8x BenQ FP931 19-inch TFT
Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX 512MB graphics card
Asus A8V-E SE motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ CPU
512MB DDR SD-RAM
Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 60GB hard drive
LG GCC-4521BB 52x32x52x16 CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive
Belinea 102005 20.1-inch TFT screen
Ebuyer Extra Value MG-415 ATX Middle Tower Case
Call of Duty 2 (PC/DVD)
Ezkey Black Office Keyboard and 3 Button Value Mouse