I've been holding off on building my new PC for months now but with the arrival of the AGP version of the NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT graphics card on our shores, it has completed the list of parts I needed to build that sub RM3,000 PC. So off I went to everybody's favorite pirates' haven PC shopping mall to get the following:

• AMD Athlon 64 bit 3000+
• MSI MS-7030 K8N-NEO Platinum Edition (nForce3)
• 2x Corsair 512MB PC3200 DDR400 CL 2.5 (1GB RAM)
• Sparkle Geforce 6600GT AGP 8x 128MB DDR
• 120.0GB Western Digital 7200rpm SATA150
• Sony 52/32/52/16 COMBO CD-R/RW & DVD Drive
• 1.44MB Sony Floppy Drive
• iCute ATX Casing with 450W power supply

Like a kid being given a Lego set, I sported the face of a happy boy in that hour and a half I spent to assemble the PC when I got home. It must have been a good day too as I did not lose any screws like I usually do. Bliss was when it fired up without problems (i.e. did not cause any major blackouts) the moment I hit the 'On' button for the first time. I took my time installing the OS and other stuff the rest of the evening.

Granted, it's not really bleeding edge as far as the specs are concerned (notice that I did not accidentally ejaculate like I did when I got the iPod this time around). It also won't give anyone bragging rights amongst the fanboys. Still, I reckon it's quite a good platform to start with. It runs the Doom 3, Farcry and Half Life 2 game demos at good framerates and other applications like Office, Cubase, Firefox, etc. fast and zippy. It's hopefully future-proof enough for the next 5 years or so (especially if 64 bit desktop computing were to take off bigtime) with enough headroom left for upgrades. The last PC I built was back in 2000 and is still running good but I left it at my parents home now so that Mom can use it to browse the web (i.e. get those cheap AirAsia tickets fast), email and IM with some friends and do that occasional MIDI-ing.

Yes, it's disturbing how geeky traits can run upwards from child to parent in my family tree.