BigPopaGamer recently showed off his lady, so I thought I should too since apparently everyone's building new computers right now.

My old girl, Pearl, is still formidable in power due to minor upgrades here and there over the last 4 years. Nevertheless, I knew it was time to move on. I sold Pearl to a friend of mine and spend the last week or two adding in a few new parts, and resetting her up from scratch (and copying all my data off onto my backup drive). I only got around to really setting up my new girl, Morrigan, in the last few days.

This is Morrigan:

As you can see, she's a product placement whore.


Under the hood, nothing out of the ordinary. Big front side fan vent, removable internal hard drive port, standard sort of DVD burner, and card reader (super useful and cheap. I recommend anyone building a computer to get one).


I like windows. I'm not really a fan of LED's at all. But they're pretty hard to avoid these days. I think this is predominantly because these are designed by geeks with poor taste for geeks with poor taste.


If you strip her down nude, you'll see beauty (it's clean beauty though, see cable ties?):

-1000w Dual 40 amp rail (for a total of 80 amps) modular Corsair Power Supply. This is, strangely, the most expensive part of the entire machine. I've never spent this much on a power supply before. It's big, but it's really stable and quiet like a ninja. Good money makes a difference I guess.
-Zalman Ridiculous Heatsink (allows me to overclock to 4ghz)
-It's sitting on a Intel Core 2 Dual 3ghz chip. I think it's 45nm
-4 gigs of ddr2 1066 kingston ram
-nvidia 8800gt. times 2. with a little slutty sli action.
-Hard drives: 2 640gig Sata 2, 1 120gig Sata 2, and one 80 gig ide that I use as a junk drive. I also have a 500 gig external. That's just barely under 2TB total. I'm not even sure what to do with all that space at the moment.

The current downside of SLI for me is that I can't have dual monitor on when I'm using the SLI function. So for now, SLI is mostly going to be for games, or for maya stuff when I don't need dual screens to work. This will eventually be irrelevant because it's given me a reason to invest in one of those 30 inch widescreen lcd's later down the road, although that may be awhile. The total cost for that future investment would be around 1300 + another 300 for a widescreen format wacom tablet, so it will have to wait till either a couple of heavy overtime weeks later on (which are definitely coming), or bonus time next spring.

My original budget pretax/shipping: 1000k
Adjusted budget after new power supply, extra video card and ram: 1400
And just to show I'm somewhat responsible with staying near budget...
+100 in rebates that I forgot to consider in the first place, +200 for selling old machine: Final Budget = 1100 (so only 100 over).

The name reference should be a little more obvious then bigpopa's lovely rig:


And that is all. Most everything is up and running sans a few minor details that will get sorted out over the next 2 weeks. Once all my files are organized and everything's back in place, I'll be recapping and painting again.

Speaking of recaps:
my old machine could handle like 25-30 browser tabs before I got a noticeable slowdown. This new one can handle a ridiculous amount more. I didn't even bother counting.
recaps will be back in a week, 2 tops

Alright. I'm done braggin' about my lady.