Rants and Rigs

So I built a monster of a computer last December with money I had been putting aside for ages. I spent like 8 hours tweaking my Windows 7 install to be exactly the way I wanted it to be, tweaking every little setting there is. I finally got it to be exactly the way I wanted it to be. So i made a Norton Ghost image of the install in the event that I wanted to wipe everything and start fresh.

Well today was the day that I wanted to start fresh.
75% through the restore "Norton Ghost has detected that this image file is corrupt. Please make another image."
Sigh.

So the fun begins again..

I needed a good vent. Nothing frustrates me more than when my setups malfunction.
I'll turn this thread into a "Show of your rig!" thread.
Has anyone else on this forum gone above and beyond to build a computer?
List your rigs specs, i'm curious.

Asus Sabertooth P67 Motherboard
Intel Core i7-2600k, O.C at 5GHZ
Thermaltake Bigwater 760plus Liquid Cooling Unit (torn apart and modded to fit my case)
16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 memory
Radeon HD 6870
2x OCZ Agility-3 60GB SSD in RAID 0
1TB Western Digital Caviar Black HDD
PC Power and Cooling 500W PSU
AMD Athlon @ 2 GHz, 768 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD, Windows XP.
I think I should replace the CMOS battery. But I won't.
That's a hell of an overclock there. I'd be scared :O
closed account (1yR4jE8b)
It's liquid cooled, it should be fine. I've seen stable overclocks to 5GHZ on air with sandybridge.
@ResidentBiscuit
What darkestfright said. The hottest my CPU gets is 45-50C (while overclocked). Note, 40C is typical idle temperature for most computers. Liquid cooling really is all it's hyped up to be. I could OC more if I wanted to. :P
Hmm liquid seems pretty boss. That's impressive.
AMD Phenom II 980 BE @ 3.8 GHz (stock clock, I need to buy a new cooler and new thermal paste to overclock without it getting hot)
4 GB Corsair Vengeance @ 1600 MHz (stock clock) + 1 GB OCZ Viper Gold RAM @ 1600 MHz (stock clock is 1333 MHz)
2 TB Samsung SpinPoint F4 @ 5,400 RPM (bought the eco-friendly one by accident, but it's ok, because AFAIK the F3 doesn't come in 2 TB)
1 GB Gigabyte GTX 560 Ti

All the hardware together cost me about £700, which is significantly less than it would have cost to get a prebuilt of equivalent spec. It took me about two years to get the money together, and even then my dad ended up paying for about half of it because I very stupidly bought some of the components before I could afford the rest, and they were sitting in my room for a year.
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Rigs are probably the best casual conversation topic for computer enthusiasts.

My home computer is a first-gen Core i7 920, bought the day it hit the stores (what was it, 2008?). it has a 3x1TB Raid5, whatever asus board was good at the time, 12GB ram, and an unnecessarily expensive ($150+) Antec case, which was such a pleasure putting together, that I almost don't regret it. It was actually the time I went off water cooling back to massive fans (Black Knight is in this one). Every time Intel puts out a new generation, I want to build a new rig, but the old one is still working flawlessly.

Working every day with large IBM and Sun servers, I get my power kick at work anyway (typical IBM servers here have 64-96 cores running at 4-5 GHz, and 0.75-1TB RAM. Suns have a lot more cores, but less GHz so it doesn't sound as cool)
What's even cooler is that I got the cooling unit for free. I called up Thermaltake customer service to complain about some incorrect (or misleading) specs they had on their website about the computer case I bought. There was a measure how long of a video card you could fit in the machine that was wrong, and i based my build off of that and got a slightly lower end card to meet the specs. Anyway, I got a really nice guy on the other end, he went and talked to the designers to explain to me why the specs were like that. At which point I was like "Okay, fair enough, but consider rewording that on your website so people don't get in the same situation in the future." Completely not expecting any reparations because it wasn't that big of a deal. But the guy insisted he send me something for free to make up for it. Lo and behold, free liquid cooling unit.
Hands down, top 10 of the best moments of my life.

EDIT:
@chrisname
I did the same thing. I bought my computer part-by-part because i was way too impatient. Although it only took me about 8 months of saving (I don't have living expenses, i'm 17, still live with my parents. Winning.) It totaled around $1,300, and my parents bought my CPU for me for Christmas. :)

@Cubbi
Agreed. A month after i finished my build, new ivybridge stuff came out, radeon HD 7 series came out, solid states halved in price, and a new sabertooth with the newest chipset came out (z77 i think?)
I'm dying to just trash what I have and go at it again, even though my computer still (and will for the next several years) tears ass.

Where do you work at, if you don't mind me asking?
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@Cubbi

Could I be nosy, and ask what sort of work you are involved in? In the past you mentioned apps the had 100's of million LOC. With the server specs you mentioned - the whole thing sounds really impressive.

Just a general idea would do - If you can't say for various reasons, then I understand.

P.S Hope everyone's silly seasons are going well so far.

Edit: Don't worry - I just found your website - from your profile :D
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what sort of work you are involved in?

It's in my profile, finance (and yes, I don't feel like reading all those NDAs to figure out how much detail I can go into)
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