Ultimate PC? I Can DreamUltimate PC? I Can Dream

I confess: I have lust in my heart -- lust for the ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard, for the eVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX KO video card, even for the Antec Performance P160 case. I've been reading Bill O'Brien's article on The Ultimate PC For 2006. I want one just the way I have always wanted a Porsche, or Diane Lane.The only problem is, if I had a Porche or Diane Lane, or the Ultimate PC, what would I do with them? I really don't know. (Sorry, Diane.)

I lust for the brand-new Athlon FX60, and the Intel Pentium 955 Extreme Edition (XE) Bill chooses for his ultimate machine, but the truth I don't do anything that requires them -- and in fact, if I had to pick between them, I'd have a hard time doing it.

I'm sitting here with Word, Firefox, Notepad, and Explorer open on a machine with a Pentium 4 in it, and it runs just fine. I've got a gigabyte of memory and a big hard disk. What I've got, to be very precise, is Nothing Special in a tower case. And it's all I need. I don't play games on it. (Who's got the time?) I don't render video on it. I don't run CAD software or crunch interstellar physics data.

So I've got about as much chance of convincing the Chancellor of the DeJean Exchequer (that would be my wife) that I need to spring $4000 or so for a do-it-yourself PC as I have of convincing her I need to date Diane Lane.

I see a growing divide in the PC hardware business -- a turn-about. It used to be that business desktop PCs had to be the most powerful machines available. Mostly because business productivity software demanded everything a state-of-the-art PC could give just to run Windows and Excel at the same time.

That's not true anymore. The big demands on hardware aren't business, they're pleasure -- games, home media centers.

Even laptops have passed this tipping point. I once needed the most powerful laptop I could get for a long time, but no more. I can do what I need to do on something that 's a lot less than the top of the line.

Is it just me? Or is it something fundamental about the PC business. We're both maturing, but the Ultimate PC at least proves we both can still dream.