There were two interesting bits. The first was that the SSD is a 2.5″ drive and didn’t come with an adapter for a 3.5″ bay. I resolved that by mounting it to one side of the bottommost slot of the 5.25″ bay and using a folded piece of cardboard to apply positive pressure to the rest. It’s tiny enough that I expect that arrangement to remain secure indefinitely. The other hiccup was that for some reason the case’s Power On LED connector was wired differently than the motherboard’s supply; five minutes shifting breakers fixed that.

Altogether, it’s a nice machine. The picture below doesn’t do justice to the sense of spaciousness the new monitor gives; it’s got the same pixel pitch as the old one but twice* as many pixels.

The graphics card came with a racing game: Dirt 2. It’s surprisingly fun; the last racer I owned was maybe 15 years ago and they were still working on fidelity and physics issues. This one is carefully and lovingly modeled. Perhaps the most impressive trick I saw was a gradual accumulation of grime after racing in muddy conditions: I never once caught it applying a decal, so the effect was astonishingly organic.

Of course, since the arrow keys are not designed for subtle analog inputs, I drive like a drunken monkey. All the other drivers in the game plot graceful paths around the fastest lines of the track while I skid unpredictably around. Thanks to the “casual” difficulty setting, though, I somehow still win frequently enough to enjoy the game.

This isn’t the only game I’ve installed, set to the maximum visual effects, and then carefully inspected for any sort of stutter. So far, I’ve been delighted to fail to produce any in-game slowdowns in any game so far without doing something ridiculous**. Still, I bought the components of this machine to work well when overclocked, so overclock it I will. I’m going to hold off on that for now, though. For the moment, it’s more fun to just enjoy the new capabilities and the remarkable quickness of everything.

** I did manage to produce some pretty bad stuttering in Mirror’s Edge by telling it to emulate a hardware physics card and render correctly the physics of every particle. Then I went around smashing windows. That’s not exactly a fair thing to do to an unsuspecting machine, though, particularly when the physics card emulator doesn’t know enough to take advantage of any processor cores other than the one the game’s running on.