After valiantly struggling for the past year, our old PC finally carked it back in June. I'd already put a new CPU in and crossed my fingers, but that only worked for so long. Luckily I was able to extract all the data off the old hard-drive using an external USB drive enclosure hooked up to the laptop. We managed for awhile with the laptop, but after reading about some Intel CPU price-drops coming, I decided the time was right to build a new rig. Although I'd built our old one, things had changed so much since 2003 that I had to do a lot of research to figure out the current state of PC technology.

Research complete, I decided on the following components:

* Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit (to allow me to use 4GB+ of RAM; the 32-bit versions of XP and Vista are unable to use more than 3GB, and possibly not even that depending on how much memory the video card has).
* Intel Core 2 Q6600 2.4GHz (quad-core CPU; I got the older B3 stepping model)
* ASUS P5K Deluxe / WiFi-AP Motherboard
* Antec 900 Case
* Corsair 620HX modular power supply (620W)
* 4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 (PC2-6400) RAM (4 x 1GB sticks, CAS4 timings)
* Zalman CNPS9500 LED heatsink + cooling fan (cools way better than the stock Intel fan + heatsink)
* Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB SATA hard-drive
* EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS Superclocked 640MB PCI-Express video card
* No soundcard (onboard motherboard sound is pretty good)
* Samsung SH-S183L SATA 18X DVD burner

I picked the components to optimize for running the latest games and high-def video editing, since even our fairly zippy year-old laptop struggles with such things. This is way more than you'd need for basic word-processing and spreadsheets!

I had all the parts aside from the CPU on July 28, so I put together what I had and installed the CPU and heatsink/fan when the CPU arrived on the 30th. Unlike the last PC, this one booted up perfectly first time, and before too long I was loading Vista, Ubuntu Linux, and downloading drivers. Vista runs very well on this PC, as do Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, which are the only games I have at this point that remotely stretch its capabilities. At the moment I'd have to say I'm squandering the power of this thing until I can get a 24" LCD monitor. The videocard doesn't really come into its own until you hit really high resolutions (say 1920x1200), and high-def video still has to be shrunk down to fit on our old CRT display. It's still cool being able to set all the sliders in games to maximum detail, though ;)

Thus far the only problem I've encountered is I can't find any Vista 64-bit scanner drivers. Carn Canon, get your act together!

Here's a photo of the new PC in action:

More at the Flickr photo stream here.

I bought the Civilization 4 gold edition last week and I'm happy to report it's even more addictive than the previous one ;) At some point I should see about installing some grid computing clients and contribute to efforts to cure cancer or search for aliens. I'm a little wary though, because our old PC was busy crunching numbers for several of these projects almost non-stop, and I'm wondering if that led to its eventual heat-related demise....