Around the start of the school holidays I decided to build myself a new desktop PC as the current system I was using at home was getting a little long in the tooth.  I decided to have a bit of fun, as I haven’t done a jigsaw in a while, and assemble it myself.  The components I ended up with were:

• Thermaltake Level 10 GTS Snow Edition Case
• LG BH12LS38 Internal SATA 12x Blu-Ray Rewriter – 12x BD-R Read/Write, 16x DVD+-R Read/Write
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO – 120mm Cooling Fan
• Intel Core i5 3570K Unlocked Quad Core 3rd Gen Processor
• Western Digital WD Caviar Green 3.5″ 1TB SATA 6.0Gb/s Hard Drive
• Corsair Force GT 120GB SATA 3 Solid State Drive – 2.5″
• Logitech G700 Wireless Laser Gaming Mouse
• ASRock Z77 Extreme4 Motherboard – Intel Z77 Chipset – Socket 1155
• Antec TP-750 750W power supply
• Corsair Vengeance Blue 8GB (2x 4GB) Dual Channel DDR3 Memory Kit – PC3-12800 / 1600MHz
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium – DVD – SP1 – 64-Bit
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 Overclocked Video Card – GDDR5 2048MB 256-bit

After several hours of assembly, routing power cables and having to return to the shop I bought it from to buy an additional SATA cable for $42.50 ($2.50 cable, $40 petrol in Wendy’s car) I finally had the system up and running.

Compared to anything else I have used, I have to say this thing is damn fast.  It boots Windows from power on in about 20 seconds.  Runs nice and cool most of the time and plays all the latest games at pretty much maximum video settings.  Also, if I decide I need more speed I can overclock the CPU, RAM and GPU.