Nice article.
I too, have recently run into severe battle fatigue on the hardware front. My current box (Water cooled, SLI 7800GTX, 4800+) was tight when it was built a year and a half ago, but is approaching the point where it could use a face lift (sorta the same way a 24 year old could use a face lift).
What's happened in the last year?
- DDR ram uncool. That high end 2GB is now junk. Is DDR2 going to make a meaningful bit of difference, nope.
- High end motherboards jumped from $140-$160 up to $350-$400. Meaningful performance gain: zip (except for a bunch of annoying heatpipes that end up interfereing with cpu heatsinks, look shiny though).
- Core 2 Duo, nice. I want one. Will I see a difference? Probably not, I'm graphics limited running everything at 1920/1200.
- Graphics. Ouch. Water cooling SLI now runs $1600.
- Don't forget to junk the old high end psu for the 1KW! model.
- Vista, wow Halo 2 at last!
Running down that list just wears me out. Could I do it, yep. Would I be the coolest kid on the block for a month, sure. It just seems like so much for so little. I'm sure when I see Crysis I'll immediately buy all that crap, but for now I bought an xbox 360 and Gears of War. Gears looks and sounds fantastic in the home theater. The console and game cost far less than a single 8800GTX and have already provided many hours of fun. Downside: game pads are the mark of the devil.
Also, VTwedge, It sounds like you've laid down quite a bit of coin on you rig over the years. Make your next upgrade a 24" Dell. That is one tweak that truly will change your gaming expereince. Flag this | Edit this post |
