I've been hinting in my recent facebook/Twitter updates that I was having trouble resisting buying computer parts. As it usually goes with me and this sort of thing, my resistance is typically very weak.

It's been almost three years since I put together my current desktop computer (named 'Trogdor'), and i was always planning on doing another build around my birthday this year. Considering the schedule i've got coming up with work around that time, my rationality for being a few weeks early satisfied me enough .

So over the past week I have assembled the parts and built a new computer, which I have named 'The Cannon' (the awesome top exhaust fan reminded me of a cannon's barrel). Like I did similarly with 'Trogdor', i also plan to put a cheap decal on the side of it, hopefully in the shape of Arsenal's cannon.

Here's what makes The Cannon awesome:
- Antec Nine Hundred Two case
- Antec True Power New 650W power supply
- Gigabyte EX58A-UD7 motherboard
- Intel i7 950 processor
- Zalman CNPS9900LED CPU cooler
- 12GB G.Skill DDR3-12800 RAM
- Gigabyte ATI HD5870 graphics card
- WD 1TB Black, and 1TB Green hard drives
- Pioneer Blu-ray combo drive

Pictures of the build can also been seen in the Gallery.

The build itself was a painful process, literally. The main PITA part was attempting to plug in the CPU power rail, mainly because of the Zalman CPU heatsink which is basically a shredder. I lightly sliced a layer or two of skin attaching the heatsink itself when it was out of the case, but after the motherboard was in the case, in attempting to attach the CPU power rail (which was just 10cm too short to make it easy), i cut myself multiple times on both my hands on the darn thing. Blood and band-aids ensued. But it looks cool so that makes it worth it .

Everything else pretty much went to plan, it booted correctly first time, which is nothing to complain about.

I can't wait to actually play some decent games on this thing, i'm really looking forward to Bioshock 2 and Supreme Commander 2.