OMG!!!! It's a new growth.....

Finally have my new baby put together, POST'd, and with an OS.

Specs:
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 512K 939-Pin
ASUS A8N-E nForce4 DDR400/SATA RAID/PCIE
Kingston 2x 512Mb DDR 400 PC-3200
Chaintech SE6600 GeForce 6600 PCI Express 256MB DDR Video Card
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200JD 320GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer
Liteon SOHW-1673S 16X Dual DVD+RW±R Black
Aspire X-Navigator Aluminum Computer Case
Dual Blue Cathode Kit
420W Orion Power Supply
Zalman Reserator 1 Plus Fanless Computer Water Cooling System

Would have had it up sooner, but ran into a snag with the POST. Apparently my original video card was bad (or I jacked it up putting the water block on it) and wouldn't POST. So I had to wait an additional 5 days to get a replacement. Worked out well though, price had dropped by about $40 on ZipZoomFly (which apparently was a 30 minute blue light special b/c the card is now $20 more than I finally ended up paying for it).

I went over budget, but I'm smiling in the end and I considered this an new job/new city present. I'm pretty excited about the Zalaman water kit. While I have always considered myself a pretty decent hardware guy, I had never tried water cooling (or water block installation). I was a little nervous in the beginning, but after installing the cpu block, the vga block, putting new thermal grease on my old PC (more in a bit), and then installing the vga block AGAIN. I feel pretty confident in my skillz. I just have toe REALLY remember to make sure the water pump is on BEFORE the PC.

My last PC (named Cypher) is still whole (I didn't scavenge any parts from it), so I have my new powerhouse (codenamed Skrubby-Pimp until I get everything installed) and a very good secondary (Cypher). Cypher has always had cpu heat problems though. Generally he runs at around 65 C when doing business computing (Word, Excel, etc.) and up into the 75+ C range when gaming. I never replaced the original heatsink/fan that came with the AMD chip. One of the side project of making the new PC was to replace the thermal grease on Cypher (my boy Pat convinced me to do this). WOW what a difference. I used Arctic Silver 5 and kept the factory heatsink/fan combo, and now my cpu temp runs at about 55 C when gaming.

Protect the gene pool, get yourself spayed and neutered...