I haven’t bought a new PC for years. Not this century actually. My old rig has been upgraded a million times (from a 350 MHz Pentium III to a Celeron300@450, an AMD Duron 800 and later a 1300). A few years ago I had my motherboard’s capacitors explode, and it was turned into an Athlon 2000+. Since then I’ve made as few changes as possible, because I wanted to get a completely new one. That has meant living with a very noisy/slow/ugly computer for a few years, but those days will soon be over.

For me, buying a new PC means scouring the web for reviews of every single component until the setup is exactly right. I love this process and with this machine especially it’s been great fun because of all the new stuff that’s been released lately. A few days from now I’ll finally find out if all that research pays off. The parts have been ordered and it will be assembled this week.

The picture I added to this post is of the Cooler Master Centurion 534 case, which will hold an Asus P5B-E motherboard and an Intel E6600 processor. Powered by a Zalman power supply and cooled by an Arctic Freezer 7 pro. Because Vista has a thirst for memory I’ve added 2 GB of fast RAM and a roomy 500GB Samsung harddrive. My trusty Dell TFT will be fed by a dual-DVI videocard, and a (SATA) DVD-RW drive completes the setup.

If all of these components play nice together it will (imho) be a Mercedes of computers. Very fast, but with good mileage (Core 2 duo processors are marvels of engineering which combine unprecedented processing power with low power consumption). And comfortable. The power supply has a high efficiency rating and is renowned for its quiet operation. So are the Arctic and the Samsung. And all that for roughly the price of a decently equipped (Mac) Mini (sorry, couldn’t resist).

As you can see, I simply can’t wait for it to be ready. I’ve opted to not build it myself because it’s been a long time since I built a complete PC, and back then the CPU cooler clip required me to use so much force it scared the life out of me.