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By outsiders the real geek is often thought of as someone who refers to his computer as his “baby”. I always found that rather offensive. I spend way more time with my computer than I ever would with a child! Oh wait… crap.

In any case, the “baby metaphor” never sounded right to me for in real life you don’t have any say in what kind of kid you get. A geek on the other hand builds his or her (…okay, his) PC from the ground up. Each component is thoroughly researched and handpicked, from the casing down to the thermal paste. Nothing is left to chance. And yet, when you start it up for the first time… when the fans start to purr and the motherboard acknowledges your craftsmanship with a hearty beep!, one can’t help but feel a little like having given birth to something beautiful. That may sound strange to people who don’t share the passion but that’s okay. I never understood what’s so great about hitting a ball with a bat and running in a circle either.

So in that spirit I decided to finally replace my trusty old PC with something a little more up-to-date. It’s been over half a decade since I built it and in computer years that’s an eternity, so the upgrade is gonna feel massive. It’s like going from the wrinkles of Sigourney Weaver to the hotness of Rosario Dawson.

Here’s what I’ve picked:

• Mainboard:
  Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P
• Processor:
  Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (2x 3.0 GHz)
• Memory:
  2x G.Skill 4GB DDR2-800 (CL4)
• Hard Drive:
  Western Digital VelociRaptor 150 GB
• Case:
  Lian Li PC-B25B
• Power Supply:
  Enermax MODU82+ 625W
• Graphics Card:
  eVGA GTX 260 Core 216
• Cooler:
  Scythe Zipang

There isn’t really anything fancy (with the exception of the VelociRaptor maybe): no water cooling, no RAID, no SLI, no crazy overclocked CPU. It’s supposed to be a rock-solid yet silent workstation. I even considered just getting a cheap, passively cooled graphics card, but along came Fallout 3 and that was the end of that. The GeForce 260 isn’t a particularly fast GPU by today’s standards but it (supposedly) generates way less heat than the 280 and is still plenty powerful for me.

So far I’ve only the casing and the CPU cooler in my hands, I expect the rest to arrive today or tomorrow the latest. I am going to take a couple of pictures (if I can convince my roommate to lend me his camera) and post them here so you can pretend to care. Giddy up, postman!