I can hardly believe it but it has been 4 months since I built a new game PC and bought new monitor.
My old game PC was based on an aging AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ with 2GB of DDR400 ram, and an ATI HD3870 video card. This was a dual-core system dating back to August 2006. It was time.
Here is what I built:
| Motherboard | ASUS P5Q Pro LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard | $115 |
| CPU | Intel Core2 Duo E7300 2.66GHz 1066FSB, 3MB L2, 45nm | $120 |
| CPU Cooler | ARCTIC COOLING ACFZ7-PRO | $20 |
| Memory | Mushkin 2x1GB PC2-6400 4-4-4-12 1.9V | $42 |
| Video | Saphire Toxic HD4850 512MB 100242TXSR | $199 |
| HDD | Samsung P1213C 120GB | |
| DVD | Sata DVD-ROM Asus DVD-E818A3T 18X | $25 |
| Sound | Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro | |
| Case | Antec Super Lanboy | |
| Power Supply | SeaSonic S12 Energy Plus SS-550HT 550W | $90 |
| OS | Windows Vista and XP |
This was basically a new system except for my favorite (and discontinued) case the Super Lanboy, the hard drives, and the Soundblaster card. As it turned out, I never connected the Soundlaster card so I am using the onboard audio.
All the new parts came from Newegg. A fantastic game system for about $650.
A personal highlight is the end of PATA (parallel ATA) drives and their ridonculous ribbon cables. Now my DVD and hard drives are all SATA and more importantly, the motherboard does some magic so that I did not need special SATA drivers on a @##$%! floppy disk to use them. Somehow Windows XP sees the drives without a special driver. I dont know what they did to make this happen but its about #$% time.
After my problem with Vista, I switched back XP and have been happily gaming every since. In the past 4 months, I finished Fallout3, Homeworld2, Half-Life2: Episode 2, and Dawn of War.
Although this system was a huge graphical and performance leap over my last system, there is trouble in paradise. This PC is unstable. As in, it crashes regularly.
I have put up with this behavior for months but its super annoying. I will detail my travails in a later post because it is time to spend more money and fix it.
