I've made my decision to upgrade my now two year old PC that I feel is starting to lagg behind... well it started last year but now I just gotta have some smooth gameplay on my fav of platforms.

Now, you will probably question some things I've decided to do to make this happen, and you might even question why I'm upgrading. I'm doing two things to bring in more cash:

1. Selling my PSP
2. Selling a few years old Dell LCD 20.1" monitor

I'm done with the PSP. I've had it for like three months and I'm done. I don't need to fill in that gap I have between home and school with games I've grown so fracking tired of. It wasn't as fun as I'd hoped. So thats going out. The monitor is a no-brainer because last summer I got a 27" Dell to rule both my PC and 360. Works wonderful and looks sexy enough to be arrested. Not ushering out that one for a couple of years.

Maybe I don't have quite enough cash to make this economically passable (I need my buffer zone), but if these two sales goes through as I plan, I'll live another three months at least.


I should introduce my current rig. An over-clocked beast of the last generation:

ABIT KN8-SLI,nForce4 SLI, Socket-939
AMD Opteron 165, 1.8GHz (over clocked to 2.21GHz)
Corsair Value S. PC3200 DDR-DIMM 2048MB (two 1024mb stick, one was corrupted and
never returned for completely no logical reason)
Sapphire Radeon X1900XT 512MB GDDR3 (over clocked to a X1900XTX)
Hiper ATX 480W, 14dB

So, yeah. It's still do-able. And that's why I'm feeling so hesitant about the whole thing. Because it does everything else I want perfectly, except gaming. But even that is a borderline case. I run COD4, UT3, TF2 decently at 1280x800 (I dare you to take advantage of my monitor's 1920x1200. I dare you!) and I can actually max out Bioshock (for about an hour before things start crashing down). Thats the beauty of PC gaming and its poorly optimized drivers and games who don't see eye-to-eye (Gears of War, Crysis) or seem to dance around like bff's (UT3, Bioshock). Sometimes stuff works and sometimes they don't. And lately things have just not been working out as good as I want it to work out.


I give you my upgrade campaign trail of 2008:

Corsair TWIN2X 6400 DDR2, 2048MB CL5 Kit w/two matched CM2X1024A-6400 Dimm's
Intel Core™ 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz, Socket LGA775, 6MB, 1333Mhz
XFX nForce 680i LT SLI, Socket-775, GbLAN, DDR2, SATAII, ATX, 2xPCI-Ex16
XFX GeForce 8800GT 600M 512MB GDDR3, PCI-Express 2.0, 2xDVI/HDTV/HDCP,600Mhz

The plan is to keep the motherboard and GPU in the family by having XFX as my weapon of choice. The MB is SLI because I want to cram another 8800GT in there to get more performance than a GTX (allegedly), and by having it all in the family I'll reduce driver complications and have the machine as reliant as possible. The RAM is fast and cheap, and I'm buying two of those packs to get 4gb (Crytek approved?). The CPU is really interesting because of the 45nm chipset that is supposed to reduce power supply by 10% and generally perform a bit faster than the 65nm. Also something about SSE4, which is good. Powerful, fast, cheap and easy to over clock (4GHz is nothing to sneeze at).

I got the rest I need, it's just the core that's being replaced. Hopefully I will get enough cash to buy this thing by the time the new Intel processor start hitting retail around late February. And hopefully by then I will have come to my senses and invested the money in my life or something.