Updating the 'puter for hardcore ownage

[Kevin]

As long as you keep desire to go overboard in check, you can do just as well building yourself as the bundle deals.

Another thing that gets people is to be realistic about "future upgrade path". How many people have actually upgraded the CPU and kept the same motherboard in the last 5 years? You think you will do it, but the CPU formats change faster than that. You will run into a different socket type before you will really want to upgrade in most cases. Memory runs into some of the same issues, but not as badly. I've carried old memory to a new mobo/CPU combo and then gotten faster memory later on when the budget allowed.

I do that with video cards a fair bit as well, I'll carry the old one for a bit, then get a new one.

Hard drives I carry forward all the time until they just get retired. They may not end up as my primary drive but there is a fair bit of stuff that I store that can live happily on the slower access drives. The stuff where HDD performance matters will be on the newer (hopefully faster) drive.

Once I got up to an SB Audigy card and now that many motherboards are putting sound hardware, not just software codecs, onboard, I don't worry too much about sound either. My system has yet to be in an environment where sound will matter that much as the speakers I'll be using won't be good enough. If I want to watch a DVD or something else that ends up on the TV and the sound through the stereo system, if I'm watching a DVD or other on the monitor on the system then I'm generally doing something else so the quality doesn't matter.

I don't generally need another keyboard or mouse and I look at monitors as once every 10 years or so at this stage in the game, if not longer.


So I've stopped considering if the motherboard has a chance to support a CPU that I'd like to upgrade to a few years down the line, if it supports the other stuff I want and it isn't a crap MB I'll save $20-$30 there and be very happy. Chances are price/performance when I want to upgrade again, even if I could just get a CPU, will likely point me to getting a new mobo/CPU anyway so that I can get whatever next gen CPU tech is out there. Even with dual core stuff you may think that socket tech shouldn't change soon and that the mobo should be able to support new stuff, but my bet is that a faster communication system to the other components will be out that will change this, or something else we can't fully predict.


Spend more on the power supply, spend more on noise reduction. Spend more to get less power consumption (if it makes sense some doesn't still) Don't spend more on very marginal performance (once you get to the level you want). I agree with Conc on that.


I was raiding just fine in WoW with a Ti4200 video card and Athlon XP 2100+, that tech was pushing 3 years old when WoW was released. I don't do a ton of FPS gaming but my mildly better 6600 GT and 2800+ (I didn't buy the processor, it was a given to me by a coworker) plays Stars Wars Battlefront 2 and Halo just fine. Oblivion plays on it too though I do notice a few places where I'm wishing for more horsepower.

Of course since I tend to keep 3-5 bootable systems in my house old parts get shuffled around and maybe that is part of the just get a CPU/Mobo at the same time. It lets me just phase out something that is getting really old (a Duron 800 system went to relatives who were just going to be doing e-mail and web browsing). An Athlon 1200 went to a friend who had a system die and at the time was mostly playing stuff like Starcraft and Diablo 2 and a bit of WoW (and yes that system was just fine for 5 mans and stuff).