So it’s settled, my new computer is on its way; well, my new computer parts are (some assembly required). I went with an Antec Three Hundred case (pictured left) which is small and discrete; I’m not interested in bright, loud fans anymore. I really, really like the minimal design of this case and the mesh on the front looks very sharp. The mesh also hides two 120mm fans! There are more 120mm fans on the side and rear and a 140mm fan on the top. The case is supplied with the top and rear fan and one extra 120mm to put where you want it. All fans come with their own speed control (set and forget). Since they are so large and will turn relatively much slower than typical 80mm case fans they will be almost silent!

For the CPU I went with an AMD Athlon II X4 630 @ 2.8GHz. This is a quad-core processor which runs at the ultra low power of 95w and is extremely overclockable from what I’ve been reading – people have hit 3.8GHz on air! I’ve decided to put that on top of a GIGABYTE GA-MA785GT-UD3H which is an AM3 board with a bunch of SATA2 and USB2 slots (6 of each), firewire, and onboard video – ATI Radeon HD 4200 which is a Direct X 10.1 card. The board has two PCIE 16x slots so I can run a discrete video card if I choose, two in fact in CrossfireX configuration or in Hybrid CrossfireX with the onboard chip. The board also has three PCIE 1x expansion slots so I have plenty of room to run a SATA3 and / or USB3 controller card if I want. I’m going to throw in 4GB (2x2GB) of OCZ Gold RAM which should do fine for now, the GIGABYTE board supports up to 16GB over four slots, so I have tons of room to expand.

As for salvaging parts of my current Barton rig, my Enermax Liberty 500w power supply will come over as will my NEC 3550A DVD burner and my Maxtor 7 300GB SATA hard drive.

Now, I know someone reading this is probably saying why Athlon II over Phenom II or even an Intel Core i something or why onboard video? Well, quite simply, I don’t need anything that quick or expensive. I want to edit my photos using Adobe Lightroom and maybe tweak a few things in Photoshop. None of which require the crazy horsepower of the Phenom II and Core i5/7 chips. I figured I could save a couple hundred dollars in parts by going with a reasonable choice (i.e. the Athlon II). Besides, the Athlon II is the same as the Phenom II except there is no L3 cache. In benchmarks and reviews I have read it actually outperforms the Phenom II in the tasks I want to use it for! The other great thing is that for almost $200 less than the Core or Phenom II chips I can overclock the Athlon II (for free) and outperform them anyway.

I’m excited and waiting anxiously for my parts to arrive. I’ll post some build pics once I begin on that journey.