New PC

I have finally took the plunge and bought myself a new PC.  About a year ago there was very bad thunderstorms in the area.  I decided to turn everything off in my room and watch the lightning from my bedroom window.  One of the bolts hit the telephone pole which is located at the bottom of the garden there was a flash of light and then a big bang.  Odd

Once it was all over I turned on the TV and PC, the TV came on ok yet there was nothing from the PC, something had went I tested out the memory, graphics card PSU on my brothers machine which was sitting spare as he was in Canada.

While he was away I stole his PC and fired my HDD in to keep me going, I have been struggling along with this until it just stopped working.  I had to buy new memory and a new graphics card to try and get this machine to stay stable.  Still no joy at this point I had lost myl rag with the machine and decided to buy new parts.  I was trying to stay under the £400 budget and get a semi decent machine.

Antec Sonata II Piano Black Quiet Midi Tower - With 450W SmartPower2.0 PSU 

Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3P Socket 775 1333SFB iP965 SATA 8 channel audio ATX

OCZ (OCZ2G8001GK) 1GB (2x512MB) DDR2-800 PC2-6400 CL 5-5-5-12 Gold XTC Dual Channel Kit (LIFETIME WARRANTY)

XFX 7600GT 590MHz 256MB DDR3 Dual DVI PCI-E

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 - 1.86 GHz 1066Mhz FSB Retail New 

I managed to stay under the £400 mark, fired in my 500GB sata drive and my DVD writer and started to build this.

I have to say I do really like the case and it is well worth the money to buy a decent case, normally I skimp on this part and go for a budget case.  Not anymore I can no longer hear when my PC is on and its black finish is very nice for the eye. A review of the case can be found here.

With all new machines there is a little bit of tinkering to get it to run stable.  I have not yet tried any games out although I have ran some benchmarks to see how well the PC performs.  I have read that the gigabyte motherboard and the processor are good for overclocking another thing I may try out at a later date.