Entirely Overpowered.

My mother has a problem. Her computer is beginning to show it's age. Indeed, it struggles to open up simple applications such as web browsers, and suffers from severe overheating problems. With a mighty 1.8Ghz P4 and 512MB of DDR it gets much agitated when my brother plays Medieval: Total War 2 on it.

Alas, my mother does not want to use Vista, coworkers telling her that it is not mature yet. In addition, the Dell/HP/Gateways being sold with XP coming in at over a grand. I suggest that there may be a better way. Using my vast array of technical "skills" I can assemble a long lasting computer for her.

I plan on approaching this with the appropriate amount of restraint. After cogitating upon the $700 budget(not including the OS purchased through her work) I settled upon the following:


Antec Sonata III 500 Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 500W Power Supply

MSI P35 Neo2-FR LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard

EVGA 512-P3-N800-TR GeForce 8800 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz

SABRENT CRW-UINB 65-in-1 USB 2.0 Internal Card Reader w/ USB 2.0 Port

HITACHI Deskstar P7K500 HDP725032GLA360 (0A35411) 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

Sony NEC Optiarc Black 20X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL 20X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA 20X DVD±R Burner

In addition, I have another 2 GB of DDR2, and a Creative Xi-fi handy. Tom's hardware managed to run two 8800GTs in SLI, so I'm not too concerned about the power source. As it happens, I came in $60 dollars under budget. The specimen jas been constructed, and software loaded, so far it's running extremely smoothly. And QUIET! I had to open up the case to make sure the fans were running.

Some have called me crazy for constructing "an overpowered machine for a middle age woman", but would I not be more mad if I didn't grab the bets bang for the buck?

Plus, it came in under budget. Bite me.