CerebralDebris

The one thing I hate about being pretty computer-knowledgeable is that whenever the time comes to upgrade, I inevitably end up talking myself into building my own machine, even though I am really past the time in my life when I enjoy doing so. I often wish I could just order something, pull it out of a box, plug it in to my monitors, and turn it on. The problem comes down to price.

I am never on the cutting edge when I buy PCs — I’m always looking for something that will play modern games and run modern apps without costing me thousands of dollars. That’s doable even if you go through a pre-built system company like Dell, so that’s not really the issue. Instead the problem is that inevitably while doing the research to figure out what it is I need to play the latest games, I also figure out that I can save hundreds of dollars by building it myself, even compared to getting decent pre-built stuff on sale (decent = Dell, mostly. I won’t touch HP or Compaq or Gateway).

I built this machine in October 2005 for around $1200, and it’s served me well, but recently it’s showing its age. It’s having mysterious bluescreen problems, for one thing. A format and reinstall might solve that, but it won’t fix the fact that the (non-removable/replaceable) fans screech, or that it chugs playing games that came out a year ago. With Fallout 3 and a couple of other cool titles on the radar, an upgrade was already looking appealing. The bluescreening (and associated “omg am I going to lose my data?” terror) just sealed the deal. I managed to put together a substantially better machine for under a thousand bucks this time. Woohoo!

And now I just have to put the stupid thing together …

(For the normal people reading this site, you can stop here. For the geeks, I’ve included the old and new machine specs after the jump)

Old Machine:

Case: Shuttle SN25P small form factor (w/ MB and PS)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3700+
RAM: 2 GB DDR-600
HDD: WD 250 GB
Video: Radeon X850 256 MB
OS: Windows XP SP2
Optical: Lite-On DVD +- R

New Machine:

Case: HEC Black Mini Tower w/ 585W Power Supply
MB: Biostar AMD 780G Micro-ATX w/ onboard sound
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Dual-3ghz
RAM: 4 GB DDR-1066
HDD: 2x Seagate 500 GB SATA 3.0 7200 RPM 32MB Cache (1 TB – woo!)
Video: MSI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit (need it for DX 10)
Optical: Samsung DVD +- RW
New keyboard, new mouse, couple other things.

Not gonna set the world on fire with that, but it ain’t a bad upgrade for $960 total, including tax and shipping!