Bought my new [photo editing] computer.. at last!

After agonizing over the past month.. reading up on the hardwarezone and vr-zone forums, visiting Sim Lim Square numerous times and poring over price lists from Fuwell, Bell etc.. I finally took the plunge on a new PC.

My old machine - a Pentium 3-733 with 512MB ram had lasted me for some time (7 yrs!), so I wanted to build a machine that would last for quite a few years mainly to manage my photos and run Photoshop. The major consideration for me was the graphics card and since I dont game too much (except for the occasional Tiger Woods golf game or Diablo/Guild Wars slash), I decided to get a low end graphics card that will support DX10 for longevity. My final config ended up like this.... purchased from PC Themes on the 4th floor of Sim Lim Square -

• CPU - Intel C2D E6750 2.66Ghz (with Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro heatsink/fan)
• Motherboard - Asus P5K-E (comes with wireless!, been using Asus for years)
• RAM - Crucial Ballistix PC6400 DDR2-800 (decided to splurge on some nice bling bling ram even though they were double the normal ram :))
• Hard disk - Western Digital 320GB Sata2 16MB cache blah blah
• DVD Writer - Asus Lightscribe DRW-1814BLT Sata 18x (cheap lah..)
• Graphics - Asus EN8600GT 256MB (a tough choice but I decided to go with nVidia because I am not sure how ATI will fare under AMD control)
• Casing - Lian-Li PC-A05B (small and cool case.. with 120mm fans)
• PSU - Silverstone Element ST50EF-Plus 500W
• Monitor - HP w2207 22inch LCD (coming from a 15 incher.. this is bliss!)
• Keyboard - Logitech Classic Keyboard Plus
• Mouse - Logitech Mx518
• Speakers - Bose AcoustiMass 5 (hooked up to an old Technics amp)

Installed it all together with my wife (love u b!)with minimal screaming.. :) Took 4 hours.. what with all the reading of the manuals and with Harry interrupting... Vista and Photoshop CS2 here we come!