The Multi-Tasking Productivity PC

Antec Sonata III 500 Black Computer Case
The Sonata is known for its quiet nature, featuring sound-deadening side panels, quiet fans, and vibration-free engineering. It's built by Antec so you know the quality is top notch and you can expect this case to last. This Sonata comes with a 500 watt Antec Earthwatts power supply, which is sufficient to feed our performance machine.

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ASUS P5K PRO ATX Intel Motherboard
ASUS is a top dog in the motherboard industry, with a reputation for solid products and great performance. The P5K line is a great fit for this configuration because of its stability and support for all of our hardware. It handles a 1333 or 1066mHz FSB (our processor is 1066mHz), supports SATA RAID, has 2 PCI-E slots for video cards, and room for 8GB of RAM.

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Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor
Four cores of multithreading power are packed into this chip, which is arguably the best value on the market for a performance chip. This CPU will whip through anything you throw at it, from 3D games, to video editing, to demanding applications. Besides being fast at its stock speed of 2.4gHz, it's very easily overclocked to 3gHz and higher. Overclocking can shorten the lifespan of your CPU, but for the performance junkie, it will be obsolete before it dies.

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G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
To match our motherboard's memory standard, we need to install DDR2 1066 for maximum performance. G.Skill is a reputable brand in the high performance RAM industry, so you can rely on their products to keep your system screaming. 4GB (2 sticks of 2GB) is enough to handle the most memory intensive consumer applications on the market today, so rest assured your system can handle whatever you throw at it.

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2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
What's better than one 500GB hard drive? Two! This pair of Seagate drives totals an entire Terabyte of storage, which is more than enough room for programs, music, video, documents, or anything else I can think of. I recommend setting up these drive in a RAID 0 (data striping) configuration to maximize performance.

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XFX GeForce 8600GT XXX PVT84JUDD3 Video Card
Although this card is made for gaming, it will struggle with the latest games on high settings, making it a great value for the non-gaming community. It features a lightning fast 620mHz GPU with 256MB of 128-bit GDDR3, meaning it's not lacking in processing power. This card won't lag behind in video editing either, and overall it's a great value even for playing today's games.

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LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner With 12X DVD-RAM Write Black SATA
Having a DVD-RW is essential for data backup and efficiently transferring large files, not to mention burning any videos you create or edit on the computer. Lite-On is the brand I've trusted for the last 7 years, and they've never done me wrong.

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Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit
It would be a shame to subject this computer to anything less than a 64-bit operating system, but I'm sure it will forgive you if you must. I selected Vista Home Premium 64-bit to take advantage of the graphical capabilities of Windows Aero, and allow the full use of the 64-bit processor and 4GB of RAM. Amazon has free shipping on most software, so the link will take you there. An upgrade to Vista Ultimate wouldn't be bad, but unless you need the extra features, it's hard to justify spending more.

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