My wife is always trying to buy me more “geek bling” and I’m always trying to duck the attention. The other day I finally succumbed to the temptation and let her pick out a new computer for me.

It’s a fire-breather, for sure. In no particular order, here are the specs:

• Coolermaster Wavemaster case
• Enermax Liberty 620 watt PSU
• MSI K8N SLI Platinum motherboard
• AMD AM2 3800+ single core processor
• 2 gigabytes of DDR2 667 memory
• 250gig WD hard drive with 16mb of cache
• 3D Fuzion (BFG) 7600GT video card
• Samsung 16x Dual Layer DVD burner

The first thing I did was install World of Warcraft. After having played for over a year with a mediocre video card — a GeForce3 — I couldn’t wait to see what it looked like with a real card. I logged in, accessed the video configuration, and slid all the settings to the right side. It told me I’d have to restart the client to have one of the changes take effect. Of course I didn’t hesitate.

Logging back into the game, everything looked great. The real test was going to be Orgrimmar. For those of you who don’t play this game, it’s the online equivalent of trying to get out of a concert venue with the 100s of other folks shouldering by you at the same time. I got there and it was beautiful: what would usually bring my system to a near stand-still was now rendering effortlessly, as if to laugh, saying “is that all you’ve got?”

The only other game I’ve got with any decent graphics is Battlefield 2. I loaded it up and tried to play it only to find that I’m going to need to throw a regular keyboard on my computer alongside the one I normally use. I’m able to re-map enough of the keys on the Kinesis Ergo Classic to play WoW, but doing it for every game would get old fast.

So, much love to the wife for the bling. I’m enjoying being able to run more than one high-load application at a time.