My new computer

It started with a rather dumb idea of me becoming an early adapter of Windows 8.
I don't remember where I saw the Windows 8 news first, but the idea of using hand gestures to control my computer seemed pretty radical.

It's almost like the scenes from the movie, The Minority Report.

To play with it I needed a better computer. My old computer (Dell XPS400) was a great one when I bought it, but that was in 2006. Now it was having hard time dealing with Windows XP.
It makes me wonder why computers slow down over time. It was still same Windows XP, but it's slower than in 2006.

Anyhow, I ended up buying parts and putting them together by myself.

I was a bit worried, but thanks to days of Google searches, I was able to figure out what to buy.

So these are what I've got:

Corsair Special Edition White Graphite Series 600T case. I chose this mostly because it was pretty. I had no idea how large it would turn out to be. It has 2x200mm fans in the front and the top for better cooling. Since I don't have any super hot parts I can't really tell if it's doing anything.

Asus P8Z68-V/Gen3 mobo. Some people told me it was too good for my CPU, but there wasn't much to choose from. I need LGA1155 socket with Z68 chipset because I wasn't planning to buy a graphic card right away. Some recommended P67 chipset which was a bit cheaper, but they don't have internal graphic. Plus, my new graphic card will be PCIe 3.0, so that really limited my choice.

Intel i5-2500. I really considered getting i7-2600K, but I realized there's no point of getting hyperthread feature. The most CPU intensive applications I'll run was Battlefield 3, and it doesn't support 8 cores. So, i5 was enough for me. Then I though I'd not mess around with overclocking, so it was i5-2500 (i5-2500K allows overclocking). This choice makes my Asus mobo look a bit too good for the CPU, but Ivybridge (Intel's new CPU) is coming and there's a good chance I'll switch over to Ivybridge with overclocking.

Cooler Master Silent Pro M600 psu. It is 80 Plus Bronze certified (80 Plus something means it's efficient. Google it for more) and modular (you can use cables only that you need. No dangling of unused cables on the power supply (see the picture. it's that neat.)

Corsair DDR3-1600MHz 4x4Gb ram. This is where things really went out of proportion. I wanted 8Gb of ram, but 4x4Gb module was on sale and it was only about $10 more. So, I bought it.

Assembly was super easy. The mobo manual had most of instructions, and after a bit of guess work, it was done. It was so easy, if you know how to flip the light switch, you're over-qualified for computer assembly already. Or it's almost like it. I'll write more about installing Windows 8 from USB later.