New Machine, At Long Last

The geriatric desktop, with various issues (failed onboard PATA ports, periodic lockups, failing DVD trays), is soon to be sent off to the recycler in the sky (Goodwill, actually).  While it felt blazing fast when I originally purchased it years ago, it's been too many years (2005 or 2006, probably).  It's a 2 GB single core AMD Athlon 64 3000 with a NVIDIA 6600 GT 128 MB.  It's slow enough that it really just sits underneath the desk, accessed via VNC now and then, feeding music to Sonos and serving as a file share.

The parts of its replacement came in today, ordered while we were still in the UK.  This new rig should remain usable for a while.  I expect I'll switch all of my Lightroom work over to it, along with my real work when I'm at home (meaning I'll probably be looking to set up some sort of simple syncing process between it and my work laptop, at least for a few directories).  The pieces:

• Lian-Li PC-Z60.  This is a brand new case; pretty pricey, but very nice.
• ASUS P8Z68-V PRO
• Intel i7-2600K 3.4 GHz
• Zalman CNPS9500 CPU cooler
• Corsair Vengeance 16 GB
• MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozer II 1 GB.  Cheers for CUDA support in Lightroom and Photoshop.
• OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB.  I realize there are plenty of issue reports with the new second generation SandForce hardware, but it seems to be much improved with recent firmware..and should be tied up while I have this.  The worry did drive me to the cheaper (albeit slower; half the channels) 120 GB version instead of the 240.
• Seagate Barracuda XT 3 TB
• LG Black Super Multi SATA Blu-Ray Burner
• Seasonic 560KM 80Plus Gold power supply
• Windows 7 Professional 64

I finished putting it all together since typing the above.  It's speedy!  The new case is definitely a cut above the Antec Sonata used in the old system; much easier to work on, much lighter (aluminum versus steel), and with better (versus nonexistent) cable management.  The Seasonic power supply packaging was hilarious: the unit itself was inside of a velvet bag, sort of like a Crown Royal bottle!