In search of...

...perfection?  Hardly - that costs a lot more than I can afford.  However, I have managed to trim down the list and identify enough critical components to get a bit further.

 

One of the worries that stopped me settling on a case was the thought of the power supply being at the bottom of the space - good for balance reasons, and may even help cooling, but will the main power leads be long enough?  That's partly why I  selected the Kublai instead of the earlier favourite, the Antec 900.  However, I've now decided to put all the worries to rest - and go for the Antec.  It helps that no-one who has built one so far seems to be complaining vociferously, and I can't imagine the cases being so popular if they are that difficult to work with.

So that's one down.

CPU remains the same, a Q6600. I can't see any reason to change that.

RAM has shifted slightly - I was dead-set on Crucial Ballistix, as it seems to give the right combination of security and flexibility, but I've been persuaded (at least in part by availability and price: few people actually sell the Crucial sticks, and Crucial themselves are ludicrously overpriced in the market) that Corsair have a very suitable alternative - 2 gigabytes only though, because another decision is to restrict the box to 32-bit Vista - still Ultimate edition: Bitlocker is screaming for investigation.  (OK, I lied, I may well get a pair of 512 Mb sticks to bring it up to 3 Gb eventually.  On second thoughts, having found that the 2 * 1 Gb pair is only £6 more than two 512's would be, I'll fit 4 Gb total, be prepared for the next stage.)

I've been very indecisive about the motherboard, but in the end have decided the Asus P5K-E/wifi is just too suitable to be ignored.  It helps that I've also decided not to go the RAID route, which was the main concern.  However, I may still get two disks, just to try it - if it doesn't work, just think of all that lovely storage.

The PSU was the next issue - just how much power would this system need?  Eventually, I've decided that a 520 W unit would suffice, since there's no way I'll be wanting Crossfire or SLI (how much is a graphics card?).  At least until the next round - my perfect PC would have dual (or quad!) graphics, RAID 10 across at least six disks, a high-end quad core CPU and a motherboard that supports DDR3 RAM - and a price that puts it way out of reach for probably the next five years.