I was given the oppor­tu­nity to pur­chase a new machine (with my choice of parts) at work and put it together from scratch, some­thing I had never done before. I’ve dab­bled in cases ever since I played games (the dri­ving force behind much of my com­puter knowl­edge), but never actu­ally assem­bled an entire box from parts.

It’s amaz­ing to see how far along moth­er­boards, and even cases, have come now. Overclocking can be done through soft­ware, as opposed to open­ing the case and fid­dling with jumpers. Fan speed is auto­mat­i­cally con­trolled for a bal­ance of silence and cool­ing. Rail mounted drive bays make hard­ware con­fig­u­ra­tions much sim­pler. Thumbscrews elim­i­nate the need for screw­drivers for a sim­ple dust­ing. Firewire ports, eth­er­net con­nec­tions, video sup­port, even 5.1 sur­round are all built onboard, for the option of extremely clean, roomy, and cool cases, even if they are rather simple.

I man­aged to put the sys­tem together with­out hav­ing to re-seat a card, clean a con­nec­tion, or wig­gle a power cable. My machine is now a P4 3.2E (I sup­pose all higher end Pentium chips now auto­mat­i­cally come with hyper-threading), with a gig of DDR RAM, a 200 GB serial-ATA HDD, and a 128 MB ATI 800XT Pro video card. I also requested another 17″ flat panel, and received it the next day, so I can take advan­tage of the dual dis­play goodness.

Work was good, but now it’s just bet­ter.