New Computer!

It has been many months since I last posted. We have had a busy summer, hopefully I will get around to posting pictures. We went to the Wild Animal Park and Legoland in San Diego, and we went to New York twice for a cousins' bridal shower and wedding! I also build two enormous Lego Star Wars sets. Unfortunately I have been stuck using my Dell Mini 9 hackintosh for the past month or so because my main computer had become pretty much unusable, which is partly responsible for my lack of posting.

However, I am happy to report that I have a new computer and my first order of business on it is this blog post! I bought my last computer at pretty much the worst time. It was the very first generation of dual core (Pentium D), which was pretty terrible. I wish I had waited for the Core line of processors.

For this new computer, I bought the parts and built it myself. Here are the specs:

Core i5-750 2.66 GHz (Quad Core)
Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R Motherboard
4GB Corsair XMS3
Sapphire ATI Radeon 5770
Western Digital 640GB Caviar Black
Antec III Sonata Case
Cooler Master 212 Plus CPU Cooler
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

I spent quite a bit of time researching all of these parts. I am hoping that this computer will be a little more "future proof" than the last one. The graphics card is DirectX 11 compatible, and I went with a 64-bit Windows 7 so that I will be able to add more RAM once 4GB chips come down in price (for a total of 12GB!). It is also nice to have Windows 7, the last computer was XP Media Center Edition, I completely skipped Vista!

The build went pretty well, thankfully even though the CPU cooler is huge, it doesn't interfere with any of the other components. The only hiccup is that one of the drive covers for the case came scratched, I will e-mail Antec and hopefully they will send a replacement part. My windows experience score is mostly in the 7's, but the Hard Drive is only 5.9, which seems low because this is supposed to be a performance drive. Oh well, I will have to research it. Right now everything is at default speeds, but I may try to overclock a little bit.