Undeterred by a lack of funds, I recently upgraded my PC again. (What can I say, I got the bug.)
It has only been two months since my last major PC upgrade but I have been annoyed by little things and AMD cut their prices 50% in response to Intel's recent Core2 Duo release. (Gotta love competition :)
2GB of memory
The first upgrade I made was adding a 2nd gigabyte of memory.
What I have read previously had me believing that the extra memory wouldnt help me but I wanted to see for myself. In particularly, I have been annoyed with how slow my PC is when quiting games. It takes forever to get back to the desktop, which seems silly. I have already turned off virtual memory, (which I thought would remove my hard drive from the equation) but the results were not satisfactory.
So I added another GB. Running with 2GB has not speed up how fast games load or how fast they play. It has, however, greatly improved the speed of quitting a game and getting back to the desktop. Not sure that was worth $120 but what my wife doesnt know, wont hurt her.
dual-core CPU and H2O
The big upgrades include a new CPU and **drum roll** water cooling.
This was a major upgrade, which involved putting my PC on the operating table, cursing like a pirate, and reading a Chinese-English instruction manual again and again. The whole process took about 2 hours and surprisingly, there were no show-stoppers.
My previous CPU was an Athlon 64 3000+ (now $70). As I posted earlier, the CPU performance wasnt much greater than my 32 bit Athlon XP, according to benchmarks. But I did move to a new socket 939 motherboard that can do crossfire (when I can afford the special video card).
The new CPU is an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ ($150). Note the X2, which means its a dual-core CPU. Benchmarks indicate I should expect a 10% performance boost since current games are not written for multiprocessors. However this should change moving forward and the dual CPU should help balance other tasks. Since the CPU's are pin compatible (both socket 939), I figured I would give it a shot.
The water cooler is really the only "cool" piece of this upgrade and I will write about that in a separate post. Suffice it to say, I'm in love.
benchmarks
After a few days, I have nothing amazing to report. No problems, minor speed improvements are about all that has happened.
Civ4 plays more smoothly but DoD:Steam hasnt changed. I still have to run the PC benchmarks to see if those change much. The one trial I did indicated that the CPU speed doubled but the graphics performance was identical.
And then there is the REAL test: Oblivion. I have been too busy to play Oblivion for a while but that is the game that got me wanting to upgrade in the first place. The game just eats hardware for lunch. (Publishers take note: An awesome game can drive a lot of hardware upgrades. So far I have changed the motherboard, 2 CPU's, an extra GB of memory and a video card to play this game in all its graphic glory. )
Ironically I had had the water cooler since my previous upgrade but it has sat in its box, on the floor, very patiently waiting for my attention. Water cooling has two purposes: quieter than a fan and superior to a fan. The latter meaning that I can overclock my video card and CPU. Hopefully I will to test both of those soon.
