Well it's taken far, far too long, but I was finally able to save up enough to replace my old, falling-apart PC with a nice shiny new one that hopefully won't need upgrading for quite a while:

• CPU: AMD FX-8120 - 8 cores running at up to 3.1ghz


• RAM: 16GB DDR3 1866


• 64GB SATA III SSD (mainly to hold the OS)


• 2TB 7200RPM SATA III hard disk


• Radeon HD 5700 running 4 displays


• MSI 970A-G46 mainboard featuring USB 3.0, 6 SATA ports, S/PDIF


• Currently running lubuntu 12.10 and heavily customized awesome

It's hard to say how nice it is to finally have such a stupid-powerful machine after always dealing with systems that were severely out of date. This thing is fast. (and why wouldn't it be, when the root partition is on an SSD and it has craploads of RAM to cache everything in ) And it actually has been working well! The automatically-installed open-source GPU driver works perfectly and is able to drive all four outputs at once, the sound has worked fine without having to do anything to it... it's almost surreal.
I can zoom in stupidly far in Inkscape before I see any lag, video encoding in real time, bsnes runs with no issue at all, I have yet to get anywhere near the limits of available CPU time or memory. That might seem like overkill, but the idea is for it to last a while without needing to be upgraded, and to be able to do silly things like encode video and run bsnes and a bunch of other stuff all at once without struggling. (Need to try Mupen64 and Dolphin sometime too...) It can be upgraded to 32GB, but that's expensive right now, it already cost just under $1000 total (including case, DVD drive, shipping, tax and all that uninteresting stuff), so I think 16GB is plenty for now.

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