My Tree House Project

Since I am an I.T student now, I figured it's about time to build my very first machine(computer). For the past few weeks, I've been researching parts for my build and it was daunting at first but I had to say it was actually pretty enjoying. After all It would be blasphemous for an I.T student not to enjoy reading about computer hardware. Well not "blasphemous" but you have to like that sort of stuff if you want to get anywhere. This would be the family computer that'll do some heavy internet surfing, office stuff and a few gaming weekends. Here is the specs.

GPU = ATI Radeon HD5770 - £120
CPU= AMD Phenom II x4 905e - £130
HDD= 500GB Western Digital Caviar "Green" - £35
MoBO= Asus M4A78T-E motherboard - £99
CASE= Antec 902 case - £88
PSU= 400w Silverpower (Seasonic) PSU 80 plus "Green Power" - £44

And the grand total iiss...£516. Ouch, that's a lot of money considering it's in Pounds and it doesn't include a monitor,the RAM, shipment and stamp duty. I specifically picked these parts to make it as energy efficient as possible without sacrificing too much performance so I will have to pay a little premium for it. I guess it's worth it because it's more green than most regular pre-built PCs and the ESB bill would be a little bit cheaper every month. Additionally, this build is pretty much a medium-high end computer so it will run any software for the next couple of years and I plan to keep it for at least 5-6 years so this would be a worthy investment. I must say out of all the components, choosing the CPU was the hardest. I was split between the 905e and the energy efficient Intel S-series equivalent of it. But in the end I had to go with AMD because Intel's S-series was too expensive and I'm already over budgeted.

I'm really looking forward to building this PC and it should be fun, sorta like the modern version of building a tree house in a vague sense specially if you get your family involved. So I guess that's were the tree house analogy comes in. Well that's it for week 8.