My computer is getting on for 10 years old! And it's still a super-fast machine. Best money I've ever spent!
It's the second PC I've built myself. The first was an AMD64 (Pentium III era) PC. That was a great machine at first, but I made a few mistakes when choosing components, due to inexperience. And I was unlucky with my timing because, not that long after I built it, there were a number of major advances in PC technology, meaning my old PC couldn't be upgraded.
I overspent on the case and PSU, thinking I'd be able to use them when I wanted a "complete upgrade". The case was beautiful, made of polished aluminium, but it only had room for a single 80mm fan. As soon as the P4 chips were released, the case was obsolete -- insufficient cooling. It was also too small for the latest "long" graphics cards that even reached the budget-end of the market. And the PSU didn't have all these extra connections for video cards or SATA drives, even though it was ridiculously overpowered -- just a waste of money.
So I had to start from scratch, learning from my previous mistakes.
This time I bought a huge case that could fit anything up to a server-sized BTX motherboard, had room for 4 large (5.25") drives, 8 small (3.5") drives, and 8 expansion cards. It has a 200mm fan, two 150mm fans, one 100mm fan, and two 80mm fans. And there's another 100mm fan in the high-end Corsair 800W modular PSU, which has more power connections that anyone could ever need. Ten years on, the case and PSU can still accommodate any upgrade I could wish for in the foreseeable future. So, at least this time, it was money well-spent.
I bought one of the Core i7 CPUs on the day of release. It was expensive, but had so many amazing features that were a massive technological advancement -- quad core with hyperthreading, large onboard caches, triple-channel memory, hardware virtualisation, and plenty of overhead for overclocking. I got a liquid-cooled CPU block, thinking I'd get into overclocking, but... I never needed to.
I picked a reliable motherboard, with two IDE ports (for my old drives), six SATA ports, and PCIe 2.0 (which was fairly new at the time). And 6GB RAM and a basic graphics card.
I've since upgraded to 12GB RAM, an nVidia GTX 770 (which is way more powerful than I need), and a PCIe 3.0 SSD, with speeds several times faster than SATA SSDs.
I can't see any reason I'd need to upgrade in the imminent future, as the PC does everything I want. I can run virtual machines, stream video, play games and browse the web all at the same time. But if I do, a CPU, mobo & RAM will be all I need.
It really is a beast, though, especially with the sound-proofed panelling (which makes no difference with all those fan holes). I can't physically lift it by myself. I made the mistake of not building it in-situ... and then had to dismantle it in order to be able to transport it to a different room! But at least no one's going to steal it! :smile: