I seem to have made a decent choice

There was a Slashdot thread on selecting components for a new computer, which led me to several hardware reviews.

And I found it really uncanny that Tech Report’s March Recommendation picked pretty much exactly what I ordered! Specifically, their “Utility Player” system (for a ~$800 price point) has an i5-750 CPU, 4 gigs of RAM, an XFX Radeon HD 5770, on-board sound, and a 500W PSU (well, mine has 550W). And their suggested alternatives page has a Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB. So that’s mostly my system; the main difference being my motherboard (GIGABYTE GA-P55M-UD2 vs. their Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 recommendation).

Kinda bizarre to see so many matches. Anyway, I like to think that shows that it’ll likely be a decent setup—and will probably last me a for a while (i.e. it’s probably five notches too powerful for what I need now :D). Which is yet another reason to upgrade to 8GB RAM when I can afford it, so that that component will also be five notches more than I need ;-)