LAB1663.NET - Sam’s bit o’ the web

Well, last night I finally upgraded my desktop at home. It’s been a long time coming. My beloved Clawhammer rig - a screamer when it was built nearly four years ago - was growing long in the tooth. It was an old single-core warrior in the age of dual-core everything. Almost everything about it was obsolete and prevented any reasonable upgrades - Socket 754 motherboard, DDR1 memory slots and an AGP slot for video…all hopelessly out-of-date. Starting last year, games have been released that have been difficult or impossible to play on the Athlon 64 3200+, 1GB PC3200, GeForce 6600GT machine.

Plans for the replacement of my computer (named Bletchley after the WW2-era codebreaking station in England) have been underway for some time now, consistently stalled because of financial priorities. However, this year I decided I was going to use at least some portion of my tax return to rebuild my home computer. Initially, I was going to spend a good bit of cash and build a mid- to high-end Core 2 Duo machine with gobs of memory and a decent 512MB video card (I was looking at Radeon 3870 and the new G92-based GeForce 8800GTS cards). Alas, fate again intervened and a family-related money pit devoured a good portion of my refund.

However, determined not to let another year go by without some sort of upgrade to my computer, I bit the bullet and spent what I could on a (very) modest upgrade. Once again, budget determined my price/performance point. I ended up with an Athlon 64 X2 processor on an AMD 690G-based motherboard, 2GB of memory and a modest 256MB GeForce 8600GT video card. It’s less than half of the horsepower I’d hoped to be able to afford, but in context it’s considerably more powerful than Bletchley and will allow me to play all of my older games at maximum settings and most newer games at medium settings…and that’s good enough for me. Plus, now that I’m on newer tech future upgrades will be much cheaper.

(I also got a 250GB Seagate SATA drive, replacing my venerable Western Digital Special Edition)

My first priority will be replacing my 17″ LCD with a 22″ widescreen LCD (probably an Acer). Next will be purchasing four 2GB sticks of memory for a whopping 8GB, followed immediately by the purchase of the 64-bit version of Vista Ultimate (I’m crossing my fingers that SP1 will be out by then). Lastly, the 8600GT will be replaced with whatever is the upper-midrange video card of choice at the time. Oh, dual SATA DVD burners are probably in the cards there somewhere as well. They’re cheap.

So that’s that. Bletchley is a front line gaming machine at my house no longer. It will probably be recruited to replace Atlas, the aging Athlon XP that functions as my file server currently.

Oh, and if you’re curious the new computer is named Deadlight*.

(No, I don’t expect to scuttle this computer nor do I expect its “lights to go dead” - I’ve just been using a WW2-themed naming convention for my computers lately and I liked the name. My Eee PC is named Dynamo)