Shiny Workspace...

Recently I took the plunge and ordered my new PC with the aim to provide a powerful enough sandbox for CUDA development etc. Unfortunately, my vanity took over and spent a bit more than I should of done on the aesthetics (relative to what I would've payed).

For those of us who appreciate this stuff and will find it meaningful, here are the specs.

• AMD Phenom Quad-core 9950 Black Edition
• OCZ 4 GB DDR2 @ 1066MHz
• Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive SATAII with 32MB Cache
• MSI K9N2 Diamond nForce 780a SLI Socket AM2+
• BFG GTX280 OC2 Edition 1GB
  Currently returned to supplier due to getting hot enough to cook breakfast on within 10 seconds of running 3D Mark 06.
  
• Antec Fusion MAX VERIS Black ATX Media Center Case

Many of the people I've spoken to about my choice of processor and memory, responded with either distain or mostly 'you could've done better' kind of attitude. Let me take the opportunity to explain myself:

1. I brought an AMD processor because all my previous processors have been Intel and I fancied a change irrespective of marginal performance losses.
2. The memory was DDR2 because most the DDR3 mainboards are hideously expensive and you don't get many 'nice' extras with them. My choice of mainboard enabled me to have a high-end Nvidia chipset with a Creative Sound-Blaster X-Fi bundled in.
   

The rest of the components require no justification.