I decided late last year that I was going to take the year off from the computer upgrade process. That doesn’t mean that I planned on absolutely zero upgrades, but that I would defer the “big stuff”. This came after a tremendous amount of hassle and fuss trying to get Vista and my 2006 PC upgrade working to my satisfaction, and after the satisfying experience I had with my MacBook Pro.
But things change… and the upgrade that wasn’t going to happen, did…
It started out relatively small, in keeping with my plans for 2008- a video card upgrade. I am back playing EverQuest 2 a lot more lately, and it seemed like a nice idea to get a faster video card. So I bought an ATI 3870 X2…
[1]
It is a really nice card, and nearly doubled my benchmarked video speed from about 5200 to about 9500 3DMark06 [2] points. I mentioned previously that this didn’t work out as planned for EQ2, and so I moved on to upgrade… pretty much my whole computer. And I did this in the knowledge that it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference at all to my main game, EverQuest 2. Here are the parts:
[3]
The parts include a Asus Maximus motherboard, an Intel Q6600 2.4 GHz Quad core processor, 2 x 1066 MHz G.Skill 2 GB Ram components, and a Sceptre Ninja Rev B processor cooler. When I assembled all the bits, the result is pretty much a new computer. If you want to see some more pictures of the parts in various poses, you can check out the gallery [4].
The combination of the Asus Maximus, the Q6600, and the Ninja cooler means I have a pretty good platform for over-clocking. I’m running the system at 3.4 GHz at the moment, and intend to get to 3.6 GHz once I’m satisfied with stability. Interestingly, even overclocked by almost 50%, the Intel processor is actually running cooler than my normally-clocked AMD Athlon 64X2 (about 35 degrees C versus 45 degrees C). Another interesting fact: the new configuration enters and exits from Windows standby without a hiccup.
Total cost of these upgrades: approximately $1,300. $475 for the video card, and $800 or so for the rest of the bits. I planned on spending no more than about $800 this year on upgrading my main PC, so…quite a bit over budget. But I get two things out of this upgrade that are worth more than money:
- A nearly 18,000 3dMark06 system (as currently overclocked)
- The ability for my wife to say “My husband as an enormous cooling unit [5]!”