Nerdsauce

Reformatting a 500GB hard drive so many times it actually now only reads as a 132GB hard drive - this was back when I was stupidly naïve and didn't know that using torrents and P2P services to download stuff also means risking downloading viruses. I also managed to download a virus once that wiped ALL the information from the board that is attached to the hard drive, so the hard drive pretty much "forgot" it was a hard drive and my computer no longer recognized it. I lost soooo much work during that 'event' I actually had to close my small web design business for good.

Reformatting a 500GB hard drive so many times it actually now only reads as a 132GB hard drive - this was back when I was stupidly naïve and didn't know that using torrents and P2P services to download stuff also means risking downloading viruses. I also managed to download a virus once that wiped ALL the information from the board that is attached to the hard drive, so the hard drive pretty much "forgot" it was a hard drive and my computer no longer recognized it. I lost soooo much work during that 'event' I actually had to close my small web design business for good.

Reformatting a 500GB hard drive so many times it actually now only reads as a 132GB hard drive - this was back when I was stupidly naïve and didn't know that using torrents and P2P services to download stuff also means risking downloading viruses. I also managed to download a virus once that wiped ALL the information from the board that is attached to the hard drive, so the hard drive pretty much "forgot" it was a hard drive and my computer no longer recognized it. I lost soooo much work during that 'event' I actually had to close my small web design business for good.

Reformatting a 500GB hard drive so many times it actually now only reads as a 132GB hard drive - this was back when I was stupidly naïve and didn't know that using torrents and P2P services to download stuff also means risking downloading viruses. I also managed to download a virus once that wiped ALL the information from the board that is attached to the hard drive, so the hard drive pretty much "forgot" it was a hard drive and my computer no longer recognized it. I lost soooo much work during that 'event' I actually had to close my small web design business for good.

Reformatting a 500GB hard drive so many times it actually now only reads as a 132GB hard drive - this was back when I was stupidly naïve and didn't know that using torrents and P2P services to download stuff also means risking downloading viruses. I also managed to download a virus once that wiped ALL the information from the board that is attached to the hard drive, so the hard drive pretty much "forgot" it was a hard drive and my computer no longer recognized it. I lost soooo much work during that 'event' I actually had to close my small web design business for good.

he already has half his parts....

ouuppss :p

Ok, it's done. I bought the items that were listed in my ebay basket just above. Total cost £351.02 - should be with me in a few days. I'll re-use most of the parts I managed to save from my old computer and give Microsoft a call see if they will let me register my copy of Windows 7 on the new machine. Thank you SO much to all of you who gave me advice, I was totally lost in the maze of options! LOL
 
I'd especially like to thank MarthiniL for his invaluable advice. You guys all rock!  :D

Yes, get this, and use the PSU, GPU, RAM, and HDD that you already have and you should be ready to go!

Well first off even ultra high end system don't really need over 1000 watts ALL the time.  Unless you plan to build a 4x Titan SLI rig that's just overkill.  But the interesting thing to me is you are comparing two different types of processing.  If computers at contemporary speeds still used punch cards to enter data then they would use millions of watts.  A brain is as different to a pc as a pc is different to a computer that uses gears or vacuum tubes.  But to answer your question more directly, I think a great deal has been written on this topic by very intelligent people.  Look up the human "singularity."  I think we will become more and more mechanical in nature slowly as time progresses.  This will be evident in medicine first as we try to prolong our lifespans via hardware over chemistry.  Even if that hardware is protein based it will supplant what had been the work of our genome.  Eventually humans will need to be defined with a broader spectrum of types or simply 'intelligence'.  We may one day see an era where you define yourself as 100% flesh human, cyber-human, or digital human.  But I do think that silicone based processors will be used first.  To a degree they already are.

Silicone is already nearing its limit in regards how small they can make processors. During tests they've discovered that long before we reach the 1nm scale Silicone actually starts leaking information, until the point it leaks faster than the input rate (meaning it literally cannot store information full stop). In the next ten years or so it will hit that limit, and so they're already looking into replacements for it. Graphene is one solution, although they are also looking at plastic composites and there has even been experiments in using algae cells as processors (the benefit with those being they can actually produce the power they need to work internally, and are near-infinitely scalable in that if you need more processing power you just allow the algae to reproduce, and if the "processor" starts to get old and die you can simply replace it with new algae cells meaning a brand-new processor on-demand).

Very interesting information, thanks for that. In the end it'll be all up to the Intel/AMD engineers to bring it to fruition. Let's see where they take us in the future.