I’m looking at putting together a new gaming machine. In an effort to cut costs, I’m going to probably just put my venerable 6800 Ultra OC in the machine, at least until I can save up some money for something better (Mmmm… X1900 XTX). I can live with that for now; what I really want is a CPU upgrade.
I have been looking at the best AMD and Intel dual core chips, which are the FX-60 and the P4 D EE respectively. Both of these are worth a ludicrous amount of money: somewhere in the $1300 to $1400 range. Holy sizzling money-sinks Batman! You could buy a whole machine for that price. It also looks like the socket form factors they are using are both approaching the end of their lifespans, so next upgrade would also have to include a mo-bo.
The thing is, I’m already running a P4 3.2GHz HT (800MHz FSB). This honestly isn’t that slow a machine, so it will take something serious to see an obvious performance win. I’m currently thinking the FX-60 is the way to go, but I’m open to anybody’s suggestions.
I am also going for a better case/cooling system + a 10K RPM Raptor HD. Unfortunately, RAID 0 will have to wait until I can afford a second one.
The good news is that I’ll have quite a strong upgrade path based on this system: up to 2 high end graphics cards plus a second drive in RAID 0 will almost certainly provide yet another performance boost next year.
That’s a lotta yarn, babe! Go nuts!
Just ask the folks at Bethesda, they’ll let you know what to order
I priced out a machine with a (single) 7800GTX in it. It would be somewhere around $4000 before tax. Ouch!
But you know if you want to play Oblivion at 16×12… 🙂
Come on, remember our 486’s were $5500? In my AMD travels (two in the past) the one thing I noticed about them was the smell. They both took about a month to ‘burn’ in so to speak. However, I never had any CPU problems with them. I also never overclocked them. It always seemed the right price point compared to Intel.