Hey everyone,

Hope you all had some happy holidays!

I took some well-needed time of to rest and rejuvenate, and am now ready to get back into things. One of the things I did was I bought a bunch of components to build myself a new rig… my old one was getting rather long in the tooth (a dual 600Mhz Pentium job that was rather smoking back in the day… :). Some of the things I learned from that rig (which I purchased from the fine folks at GamePC) was that quiet is ultimately more important than power. The box is a small jet engine, and the white noise in my office is far too noticable. The other two boxes I have in there that act as servers are also far too loud IMHO, so getting another powerful, expensive, and noisy box wasn’t a good idea.

This time around, I opted for quieter and not cutting edge power. I’m not playing as many games as I did, so CPU horsepower isn’t the most important thing in the world. Also, it doesn’t make sense to get the fastest CPU around just to bottle it up with slower memory or disk (which, sadly, is invariably what you’ll do with today’s components). Your computer is only as fast as the slowest component (and to think I spent 6 years in grad school for that little gem).

So, here are the specs. Everything was purchased from NewEgg, which is rapidly becoming the Amazon of computers — good prices, fast shipping. Sadly they do seem to charge too much for shipping, but such is life.

PSU SEASONIC|S12-500 RT - Retail (Qty=1,Price=$129.00)
DVD±RW | PLEXTOR PX-716AL/SW RT - Retail (Qty=1,Price=$138.99)
CASE ANTEC|P180 RT - Retail (Qty=1,Price=$124.99)
MB ASUS A8N-SLI Premium NF4SLI 939 - Retail (Qty=1,Price=$163.00)
HD 160G|ST 7K 8M SATA2 ST3160812AS - OEM (Qty=2,Price=$194.00)
CPU FAN | ZALMAN CNPS 9500 LED - Retail (Qty=1,Price=$62.99)
CPU AMD 64 |3800+ ATHLON X2 939P RT - Retail (Qty=1,Price=$322.00)
VGA GIGABYTE GV-NX66T128 6600GT RT - Retail (Qty=1,Price=$119.99)
MEM 1Gx2|CORSAI Twinx2048-3500LLPRO - Retail (Qty=1,Price=$298.00)

Extended Warranty Fee: $0.00
Subtotal: $1,552.96
TAX: $0.00
Shipping and Handling Charge**: $34.47
Total: $1,587.43

I installed Windows XP Pro SP2 on the box. This was a bit of a pain, as I had to create a floppy drive with drivers for the SATA RAID controller and didn’t buy a floppy for the box (as I can’t remember the last time I used one). Oops. So I had to steal one out of one of my Linux boxes, as looks like the floppy drive in the GamePC box is dead. D’oh!

Other than that, everything is working just fine so far. I’m looking to pick up a couple of Nexus 120mm fans for some extra cooling (without increasing the amount of noise) and ordered a Linkskey card reader for a little under $20 ($13 + $5 for S/h… still better than buying retail around here) so I can easily read SD and CF cards. So far, so good!