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.