Time for an upgrade

I've been looking at replacing my machine for a while now as it's been showing signs of slow agonising death for quite some time. When it gets to the point that texture and vertex corruption in games are a good day it's time to take the thing out to the back yard and shoot it.

After a large bill being delayed till next year I had the money to consider the task. Last time I did a sort of stop gap upgrade replacing the processor and the graphics but leaving everything else in place as a result the motherboard and memory are all now totally obsolete. Also Intel have gotten good since the last time I was in the market for a machine, as a result I basically have to replace everything.

The choice of processor is pretty easy Intel are where it's at these days so I based my system on a intel core 2 quad 6600 a cheap but usually pretty overclockable little number.

After that I needed to pick a motherboard, but to decide that I needed to work out which graphics firm to go with ATI or Nvidia. Up until recently this wasn't much of a choice but ATI have made some interesting strides of late in releasing their 4800 series the 4870 and the 4850 which compete fairly well with their nvidia counterparts sitting with the 4870 being roughly between the 280 and the 260 the 4850 being below or even with the 260 as well as being a fair amount cheaper. But just recently they released something else something a touch more powerful, the 4870 X2 and 4850 X2 both of which are doubled up versions of the aforementioned cards with a few bits of additional hardware and a few tweeks (more memory and so on). The 4870X2 is pretty much the most powerful card out there (At a price) and it's crossfire enables so you could (if you wanted) stick two of them in one machine though since they consume a bucket load of power you'd need a pretty beefy psu for that.

Armed with a few hundred reviews I concluded it was time to give Ati another try and selected the 4870x2 I decided just to stick with one of those 2 would be a bit more than my budget would stretch to at the moment.

With the ati card selected it was time to pick motherboards there are a few options there the x38 which is pretty good if a touch old supports DDR2, the x48 which is hand picked x38's with the option of DDR3 and then there is the P45 the new kid on the block which will do DDR2 or 3 but most boards support 2 atm.

I figured DDR3 is still not worth the extra money for the minimal performance gains and since x38 and p45 are roughly equivalent in price I went for the P45 which shows some performance gains.

After that it was pretty much standard stuff grab a set of ddr2 4gigs worth, a hard disk 750g sata2 samsung spinpoint, and a 1000w psu. I also grabbed a case as my last one no longer fits modern psu's, something I discovered when my last psu blew and I had to use a hammer to bend the inside of the case enough to get the replacement to fit.

So I ordered all that yesterday and today it's sat in boxes next to me ... tempting me. Anyway hopefully it should be a pretty good system and able to play games for the foreseeable future, I might even get to try crysis now I have a computer that has the specs to run it, at least on low detail at 640x480 ;)