Once again I must apologize for not updating. Life has been pretty busy the last month since I got home.

Anyway, I ordered a new computer from NewEgg a couple days ago, and the monitor arrived today. I must say, a 19″ widescreen LCD is a huge difference over a 17″ CRT monitor just in terms of size. Unfortunately the rest of the beast of a machine won’t be here until Monday. If only I had clicked “order” a few hours earlier

So, what is this beast of a machine I’m building, you ask? Well, first, this is the first computer I’ve built that has an Intel processor in it since the laptop I bought back in ‘96. Yes, that’s right kids, At the heart of this bad boy is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400, affectionately referred to as a “Conroe”. Dear Lord, what has this world come to?! I was originally going to get an AMD, and do the whole SLI thing, but the Conroe’s benchmarks impressed the hell out of me enough to turn me to The Dark Side. I guess the Intel semniar at Quakecon where they showed off the Core Duo Extreme was always in the back of my mind, and some of the guys in #oldwarez twisted my arm enough to finally push me towards it.

One thing I didn’t shy away from was ASUS. I got the Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard which was rated really high. The chipset on it outperforms all the other current chipsets available for the Conroe, and it has built-in wireless. Now I have a reason to stop stringing cat5 cable all throughout my house.

Next, I decided on the eVGA GeForce 7900GT for a video card. It’s already overclocked, and it got some pretty good reviews, so I figured what the hell. It sure beats the crap out of my old Radeon 9700 Pro, and Nvidia’s Linux support is a million times better!

After all that, I got a gig of Patriot DDR2-800 RAM, and a Sunbeam Transformer case as pictured:

All in all it’s a pretty sweet machine, and should last me awhile. Hopefully when it’s time to upgrade I can do it bit-by-bit instead of having to buy an entirely new setup.