Well, it’s about time to upgrade. My PC has served me a lot longer than it normally would have; its major parts are now over four years old, and I’ve tended to upgrade every two or three years. The video card is also becoming unstable, and I have to underclock it by a fair bit just to avoid crashes in the middle of games, but it’s not worth replacing it alone when the rest of the system would be underpowered in comparison. My poor, overworked Linux/HTPC box is also hungrily awaiting the hand-me-down upgrades it will inevitably get.
So, what shall I replace it with? The Mac Pro is a nice machine…
…if you drive a BMW. Four cores is way too much overkill for the primary purposes this machine will serve (mainly gaming, which is still largely bottlenecked on single threads and only just starting to move to dual cores). As a gaming machine it would be in Windows a lot, requiring a lot of rebooting if I wanted to do OS X work as well. Higher-end video card support is still a bit sketchy; the X1900XT you can get with it is respectable, but still no 8800GTX. And even a midrange configuration comes out to over $3400. Ow.
Well, there’s always Dell. It looks like I could put together the fundamentals of a good gaming system for around $1800 (and potentially lower with coupons). Except that the video card choices aren’t all that great here either, so I’d have to add my own in later. People have been having some trouble fitting certain cards into the BTX cases that Dell has moved to, though. And their power supplies tend to be the bare minimum necessary, so that’ll probably have to be upgraded. And they still force some stuff into the bundle that I don’t need, like another monitor, or Vista…
Oh well, it looks like I’ll be building one myself, again. I don’t mind though, as it satisfies my inner control freak. And although I don’t have a full list of specific pieces yet, a rough estimate puts the total cost at around $1500-$1700, with fairly fast, high-quality parts.
One thing I’m going to do differently this time around though is focus a bit more on noise reduction. Fortunately there’s already a lot of collective expertise on this subject out there, and you don’t even have to compromise much on performance with modern parts. I’m still researching the rest of the components, but so far I’ve already ordered a new case and power supply, which are often the worst culprits when it comes to noise.