Wednesday, May 31, 2006

I splurged

My brother talked me into playing GRAW. The game requires some nice hardware to play nicely, specifically a good GPU. My old one (nVidia 6600GT 128M) was lacking in memory so I wanted to upgrade. My current system only supports AGP and all the nice new cards are PCIe. This, of course, means upgrading my mobo, memory, etc. I ended up having to buy a whole new system just to upgrade my video card. Sigh.

I kind of went hog-wild hoping this new one lasts more than two years. Here's what I've got now:
  • Athlon X2 3800 64-bit dualcore CPU running on an ASUS A8N32 SLI Deluxe mobo
  • 2G of DDR PC3200 RAM
  • Asus Geforce EN7900GTX 512MB DDR3 PCIe video card (and down the line I'll add a second)
  • Creative Labs Audigy2 soundcard
  • 520W power supply
  • C: 36G Western Digital Raptor SATA HD (10,000RPM!)
  • D: 250G WD HD (7,200 RPM)
  • E: LG 16x DVD-RW (dual layer) (GSA-H10N)
  • No floppy drive!
Interestingly, I'm still running Windows XP Pro 32-bit as it apparently runs faster 'cause the drivers for the 64-bit version simply aren't up to speed yet.

1 comment:

Titytwister said...

That’s some spanky stuff there Paulie, sweet!

The 64bit does run faster but a lot of programs (Maybe even GRAW) won’t run on 64bit. I loaded it up and found I couldn’t run Skype (which I use daily), my webcam didn’t work… on and on. You have duel-core now, that will speed thing up nicely.