Aside from having a gaming rig capable of playing the games I like at their max resolution and detail settings, there are a few other goals that I'll be trying to achieve.
- It should be fairly straightforward to physically put together and take apart, as I'll likely have it in pieces on a regular basis.
- It must look tidy enough and run quiet enough that my girlfriend won't give me a hard time about it.
- It should have a long, incremental upgrade path. I don't want to have to throw away and replace a major piece of expensive equipment for every increase in performance.
- It must be able to sustain extended periods of load in an unair-conditioned room. (So no benchmarking sprints at extreme overclock settings, like I've seen published on a few forums.) Any benchmark results that I publish will (unless otherwise noted) be based on the configuration that I run with on a daily basis.
