As you know if you’ve been reading my blog for the last year or so (which you probably haven’t), I purchased my laptop almost exactly 11 months from now, as my very first computer. At the time, I was amazed by the fact that I had my very own computer, where I could install and download whatever the hell I want. Plus, having used a shared Compaq Presario sporting a huge Celeron 1.7 ghz, 386 Mb of RAM and a shittyass motherboard and very limited hard disk space, I thought that my laptop performed like a beast. So for about a year, I’ve been doing random stuff with my laptop and just generally having fun with my “kickass” hardware. This summer however, with the intense stir about the Core 2 Duos and the wide-spreading of the Nvidia 8 series, I decided that maybe I needed something slightly more powerful: a kickass desktop rig to rock at LAN parties and such.

It’s pretty much in mid-march that I started dreaming about the rig I would build for myself. I started buying overclocking and hardware magazines like I was a mag-whore, looking over reviews and suggestions on rigs with the hottest gear available. Of course, in the beggining I thought big: dude, all Asus hardware, 8 gigs of ram, dual 8800 GTX Extreme overclocked, liquid cooling, uber QX6800 quad core, and all. Of course, I was only dreaming: no way my job at McD, even for a whole summer’s time, was going to pay for such a godlike machine. By the time that I wrote this post, I had to come to the realization that I had to be reasonable, and the post was pretty much on track with what I plan on buying now. Only thing was that back then, I was buying a scooter to travel around before I was buying another computer, so I didn’t expect any component to be bought until Christmas time. From the previous post to this one, I had plenty of time to change my mind: lets gradually save up for a car instead, and buy a PC in the meantime.

So a meagre week after starting to look over my components list, here goes my first 150$ component that officially commences the project: a Thermaltake Armor JR straight off ebay. I the original article on my desktop system boasted a Tt Armor full tower version, but because I want this build to be as cheap as possible and that one of my 1337 gamer friends told me that big SLI rigs easily fit into a midtower, I decided to go with the cheaper, lighter and less expensive JR variant.

So yeah, project Fr0stByte definitely has me very excited. And by the way,  the name Fr0stbyte comes to my usual naming process: taking what it looks like, then deforming it till it looks cool. In this case, the chain looked something like this: Blue(case fan colors)->Ice->Cold->Frost->Frostbite->random geeky additions = Fr0stbyte! Pretty cool eh?

Let the ebaying begins. Next Thursday just happens to be payday, which means I will be buying the other chassis component: the power supply, an Ultra Xfinity 600 watts dual-rail. Be on the lookout for other articles on project Fr0stbyte. ETA: October 2007.