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Just my latest Frankenstein Box, made of parts from the last box with new parts stuffed in to make the beast faster. Originally, it had a heart of Core 2 Quad Q6600 and EVGA Nvidia 780i, and was maxed out with 8GB of DDR2-1066MHz RAM.

Last week one of my original 4 Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 rpm drives in RAID10 died, and I replaced it with the WD RE4 1TB drives, which are rated for use in small RAID enclosures. I used this opportunity to replace the 16GB (4x4GB) of 1600MHz 1.65V RAM with the much better 32GB (4x8GB) 1866MHz 1.5V RAM, which will respond better in overclock situations.

I use this box as my primary do-it-all PC. I use several Adobe products, and spend a lot of time with virtual machines running for educational and testing purposes. Having 6 hyperthreading cores and 32GB of RAM available, along with a processor that supports the most advanced virtualization instructions (VT-x, VT-x with EPT, VT-d) really gives me a lot of room to provide my VMs with stats that rival many people's physical desktop computers. I have access to a beefed-up (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM) Ubuntu 12.04LTS x64 VM, a Windows 8 CP (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM) VM, and a Windows 7 Home Premium x64 (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM) with a clean snapshot to roll back to that I use to test questionable installers/software/websites for malware.

In this computer's future is a new, high-quality PSU from Seasonic with a high 80Plus rating. Next will be a solid-state drive in the 512GB range. Afterwards, I believe I will take the guts left over from my previous build and use them to build a second PC for use as a file/backup server, with a pfSense VM running to take the place of my router and a MythTV backend.