A New Addition to the Family

Monday I ordered my early birthday present from TigerDirect (discounted by my personal account manager, since they seem to have a very loose definition of “Business Account”). Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll be unwrapping and assembling:

  • An EVGA nForce 680i SLI Socket 755 Motherboard
  • An Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 GHz Processor
  • An EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB Video Card
  • 2x 1024MB sticks of Dual Channel RAM
  • A Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA Hard Drive
  • A ThermalTake PurePower W0100RU 500-Watt Power Supply
  • A Logitech G5 “Gaming” Mouse

This marks the first time in a long while that I’m essentially buying an entirely new computer (minus a case and optical drive) rather than upgrading individual components. I’m looking forward to being able to keep my old PC around while assembling the new one, rather than scavenging it for parts.

I spent a little less on a couple things so I could spend a little more on some others and still keep the price reasonable. Quad-core CPUs can be had for not entirely unreasonable prices, but for the performance difference I’d see right now the extra $200 seemed better spent elsewhere. Modular power supplies strike me as being the way all power supplies should be, but for now the ones I saw were either more than I wanted to spend or reviewed poorly. I’ve been happy with ThermalTake’s PSUs in the past; maybe if I ever go crazy and upgrade to an SLI setup (and its concomitant power needs) I’ll go modular.

The one area I really splurged was the video card which cost about twice what I’ve ever paid for a video card in the past. While there’s not a whole lot enticing me to upgrade to Vista and DirectX 10 at the moment, I’m hoping that by investing in a pricier DX10 video card up front I’ll get a little more life out of my purchase.

It looks like while we were gone on our honeymoon, Jeff Atwood ran a series of articles on building your own machine. The last one included a recommended parts list and appeared shortly after I’d put my order in.  The important bits match pretty much what I ordered so I’m hoping I’ll be pretty happy with the new setup.

2007
07/25
CATEGORY
computers
hardware
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  • Comments (2)
    • Dave
    • July 25th, 2007

    Wow John, as if a new car wasn’t enough! Sounds fantastic though… although quite honestly I’d rather see the CVT transmission in action. ;)

  2. Looks like we have to wait at least until Saturday now before we get the new car because of a mix-up at the dealership.

    On the upside, though, it sounds like we basically got the CVT transmission “for free” as a result of the same mix-up.

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