I bought the sum of the parts, to build myself a new media box today.

Let’s just get the parts list out of the way, shall we?

• ASUS P5B-VM DO Mother Board
• GigaByte NV76G nVidia GeForce 7600 GS Video Card
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4gHz CPU
• 4 * 1GB Kingston DDR2 667 Ram (4 GB Total)
• Seagate 500GB SATA Disk (ST3500630AS) (Storage Drive)
• Seagate 250GB SATA Disk (ST3250820AS) (System Drive)
• ASUS 18x SATA DVD-RW (DRW-1814BLT)

I wrapped the entire thing up in an Antec New Solution Series NSK2400 Desktop case that I already had laying about, and went to work.

So far, it has been a rather frustrating machine to work with. At first, I had plans of putting in into a brand new Antec Minuet Case that I had purchased, but, it turns out dipshit sales man didn’t tell me that I would need a low profile graphics card to use that case. As a matter of fact, he specifically said that one of the advantages to the case over one of the ASUS Pundits that I was looking at, was that I could use a full sized card. Final score? -2 for product knowledge. No wonder I don’t work for him anymore. =)

Once I got the machine transferred over to the older case, I ran into the second snag. Turns out that I got some older stock, and the mother board and CPU had a bit of an allergic reaction to each other. It was nothing that a BIOS flash didn’t fix, but it was a pain in the ass none the less.

Once the BIOS was flashed, I got somewhat brave, and threw in the Windows Vista Ultimate Demo Version that he gave me to try out. So far, not all that impressed, but, it’s not even installed yet. The installer just seems old, antiquated and, well, chunky. It really shows me just how far my beloved Debian has come in this aspect since Ubuntu came onto the scene. The box will most likely end up as a Debian Box, but for now, what is the harm in playing with Vista?

What I have noticed about the machine so far, in very general terms, is that it’s damn near silent. It’s actually sitting on my living room table, within arms reach, and I can hear my laptop’s CPU fan over any noise that the new machine is making. Definitely a huge improvement over my old PIII machine that this will be replacing.

I have some thoughts for further hardware that I may, or may not put into the machine. Part of me is thinking that a TV-Tuner card would be a pretty kick ass way to fill up that 500 gig storage drive, but then thre realist in me says “You cancelled your cable TV 4 months ago, because you never watched it…”

I am pretty sure the next purchase for it, is going to be a second 500 gig drive (RAID 1 is your friend, kind of) and I am going to go look at 32″ LCD TV’s tomorrow, to use as a monitor for this beast.

I’m really looking forward to a new main machine to play with. I just need to find a hostname. Any suggestions?