The '09 Rebuild Pt. I

Anyone who has an avid passion or feels a couple steps above a passing interest in something will experience periods where the need to get into that thing will be higher than others. I'm guessing people who like to travel will have periods where they need to get up and go. J has his moments where there's a burst of car activity and lots of action taking place in the garage, and then there's times when there's a lull and his activity is limited to trolling eBay and the forums for parts. I get that way about music, right now I'm on an extended trance kick... but recently I was bitten by the need to rebuild the computer :-)

OK, I'll spill the beans. Although a large part of this is me giving myself a gift for completing my masters and earning honors, a large part is because I saw that The Sims 3 is being released in June. (If you're not sure what The Sims is, it's only one of the best selling PC games in history. Learn about The Sims 3 here.) I played heavily until things with the masters started getting intense, but now that I'm done I can immerse myself again and a new Sims base game, meant it was time to update so that my machine could handle it. So that's the basis for this build.


I'll start out by listing what I had before I started:

• ASUS A8R-MX/SI 939 ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard (shown above)
  
• AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Venice 2.4GHz Socket 939 89W Single-Core Processor Model ADA3800BPBOX
• CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Desktop Memory Model VS1GB400C3
• A 7-series NVIDIA GeForce PCI Express video card (I think either 7600 or 7800)
  
• Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Card
• ASUS 16X DVD±R DVD Burner with 12X DVD-RAM Write and LightScribe Black E-IDE/ATAPI Model DRW-1612BL-BK
• A 400 watt PSU that also supported SATA connectors
• Widescreen Hanspree 19" LCD monitor (HDMI capable)

My initial intent was to upgrade the motherboard, CPU and the RAM, but of course, even the best laid plands...