New Dual-Core AMD PC Details I would like to share some of the details of my new PC with you. Most of the parts were purchased online via NewEgg, the best online retailer for PC parts, in my opinion. I assembled the machine this past Friday.

I'm very impressed with the performance of this machine, as it loads and runs Vista quite effortlessly. Vista's resource-hogging indexing and system restore features do not bog it down. The Vista rating of this new PC is 5.3, compared to a rating of 3.7 on my old PC (assembled in 2003). The Vista rating scale currently runs from 0.0 to 5.9. The difference in the way Vista runs on my two machines is dramatic.

NOTE: The following list does not include every single component. Second, the prices shown at these links do not necessarily reflect what I paid. In most cases, each part was purchased (sometimes significantly) below the standard retail price.

Monitor
SAMSUNG 206BW 20" Widescreen LCD 3000:1 2ms 1680X1050

Video Card
EVGA e-GeForce 7600GT 256MB DDR3 PCI-Express

Memory
4 GB of DDR2 PC2-5300 667 MHz RAM

Processor
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Windsor 2.6GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM2

Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-M59SLI-S5 Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX AMD

Primary Hard Drive
Western Digital Raptor 36 GB 10,000 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s

Secondary Hard Drive
Western Digital Caviar SE 16 500GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s