Originally I was going to take one of my old Pentium 4 PCs that I wasn't using and put a new video card in it to make a home theater PC. Unfortunately when I cracked the case I found it was older than I had remembered- it didn't have any AGP slots nor any PCI-E. Figuring it was a bit too obsolete to do what I wanted I decided to move my "daily driver" PC, a homemade AMD X2 on a current board (DDR3 memory, Nvidia GeForce 9400GT card, etc) down to the living room and build myself a new machine for surfing, homework etc.I settled on a Gigabyte H55M-S2H board. It's a micro-ATX, so I can move it to virtually any case I like. It has built in HDMI & SPDIF output, which is a nice bonus. There's just slots for 2 DIMMs but it will handle the fastest memory. I went with 2 x 2GB Mushkin Blackline- really nice stuff! My WEI score for memory is 7.3. I opted to go for the Intel i3; it's built on a 32 nm process and has decent on-die GPU capabilities, plus hyperthreading. Sure, I could have spent a bit more to step up to an i5 but I already hadn't even intended to spend this much, so I was trying to avoid "price creep," that phenomenon where a few bucks more here and there turns into several hundred dollars more than you intended.
There's only one more thing I decided I had to have- an SSD drive!
So I ended up getting a Mushkin Callisto 60GB SSD. It gets awesome reviews, both at the 'Egg and at Amazon, and posts sequential read numbers of 285MB/s! Some users report going from a cold boot to having an open browser in Windows 7 in 15 seconds. And I read that 7 will install on the Mushkin in 5 minutes! 
I plan to install the drive later this evening.All in all, this has been fun! While my new PC isn't really SOtA by any means it's by far the fastest machine I've ever owned. Most of the time when I built a new PC I recycle as many components as I can...but this time almost everything is brand-spankin' new. About the only things I reused was the really superb Antec case, a newish Antec PS and the SATA 160GB drive that I had Windows 7 on. One really cool bonus- I pulled that drive out of a computer with an Asus board and AMD processor- and Windows 7 ran perfectly without being reinstalled! That to me is completely unheard of. I gotta say I'm loving Windows 7!
