So I started playing World of Warcraft again recently. And for some reason my computer starts hating life at the worst possible moments. When I was playing last year it was still ok, but now, not so much. At seemingly random times frame rates will drop, graphics will completely disappear... and worse case is that the graphics card completely stops feeding a signal to my monitor. I could probably fix it with a new graphcis card, but the machine is already three years old. It's time to move on. Plus I was already craving a new machine after building Anna's last month. The components I ordered for mine are mostly the same as hers just with a better processor. I got the one I originally wanted for Anna, but which was OOS everywhere at the time; demand was much higher than initial supply on the recently released CPU but it's fairly easy to come by now.
So here's what we have coming.
Ultra Black Aluminus tower case - I love this case. It's not as accessible as my old one which featured latches and a hinged side panel. But this one has a lot more space inside, and has a double hinged front door allowing easy access to drive bays or control panels. One of my biggest frustrations in building a new machine is usually working the front panel off without breaking anything. No longer an issue!
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3l - A no frills Intel P35 motherboard. Don't need SLI or anything fancy. I'll be sticking with the onboard sound as well, as long as it isn't complete crap.
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Processor (3.0 Ghz) - It's really the current sweet spot for gaming PCs. Quad cores are overrated for gaming, and the new E8000 line of Duos features 45nm chips (uses less power and runs cooler than earlier lines) and a cache bumped up to 16MB. Supposed to be fantastic for overclocking, with many users breaking 4 Ghz. I'll be leaving it at stock speed for the forseeable future though. On a sort of sidenote I'm a little uneasy on this purchase just because I ordered through a new (for me) company. But Newegg was OOS again, and TigerDirect was overpriced by about $26. Hopefully FuturePowerPC comes through and gets it to me soon - both the Dell (monitor) and Newegg (everything else) orders have already shipped. FuturePowerPC lists the order as "To be shipped." Here's hoping it ships soon. From the looks of things everything will arrive on Wednesday but the proc is up in the air. And now that I look up a link for the item on Newegg... it's back in stock. *sigh*
EVGA GeForce 8800GT, 512MB of DDR3 RAM - Another sweet spot, at least to me.
4GB (2x 2GB) Corsair XMS2 RAM - RAM is so inexpensive right now (only about $85 after rebate), I was tempted to get 2, and go up to 8GB. Reined myself in a little as that would be overkill.
Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 250 GB SATA3 drive - No need for a billion drives and terabytes of storage. Cool and quiet, all I need.
Samsung SATA DVD+/-RW drive - was going to use the old one, but why hang on to an IDE device when the new drive is only $27?
Corsair 450W PSU - Not filling up the box with a lot of power consuming extras. 1 drive, 1 low power consumption processor, 1 graphic card. 450W is plenty. It's quiet and runs cool.
Dell 2208WFP - 22" widescreen monitor. It's a TN panel which makes many people cry ("Oh noez lightbleed!") but my current Samsung is a TN and the bleed doesn't bother me much. Same monitor we got for Anna and I couldn't be more pleased.
Hardware is rounded out by a couple of quiet 120mm fans, and that's that. I'll be installing Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition - so far I've not had the issues with Vista that I'd feared. It runs smoothly, and hasn't caused any problems with any older games we've played on it so far, and WoW runs beautifully.
Looking forward to all the parts coming in. We've been very happy with Anna's computer in both power and noise level. Her old PC often sounded like a jet airplane under load. Next to her new one, my current machine now has taken on the jet airplane role. My new one is basically the same with a little more oomph in the processor, so the computer room should soon taken on a peaceful atmosphere.
Hers was also far easier of a build than my last machine was, so I'm hoping this one goes as smoothly. The only problem I experienced with Anna's was that on the first boot the CPU fan didn't want to spin up, but that problem magically disappeared. I freaked out, but I expect it this time. Hopefully no other bizarre problems will present themselves.
So here's what we have coming.
Ultra Black Aluminus tower case - I love this case. It's not as accessible as my old one which featured latches and a hinged side panel. But this one has a lot more space inside, and has a double hinged front door allowing easy access to drive bays or control panels. One of my biggest frustrations in building a new machine is usually working the front panel off without breaking anything. No longer an issue!
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3l - A no frills Intel P35 motherboard. Don't need SLI or anything fancy. I'll be sticking with the onboard sound as well, as long as it isn't complete crap.
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Processor (3.0 Ghz) - It's really the current sweet spot for gaming PCs. Quad cores are overrated for gaming, and the new E8000 line of Duos features 45nm chips (uses less power and runs cooler than earlier lines) and a cache bumped up to 16MB. Supposed to be fantastic for overclocking, with many users breaking 4 Ghz. I'll be leaving it at stock speed for the forseeable future though. On a sort of sidenote I'm a little uneasy on this purchase just because I ordered through a new (for me) company. But Newegg was OOS again, and TigerDirect was overpriced by about $26. Hopefully FuturePowerPC comes through and gets it to me soon - both the Dell (monitor) and Newegg (everything else) orders have already shipped. FuturePowerPC lists the order as "To be shipped." Here's hoping it ships soon. From the looks of things everything will arrive on Wednesday but the proc is up in the air. And now that I look up a link for the item on Newegg... it's back in stock. *sigh*
EVGA GeForce 8800GT, 512MB of DDR3 RAM - Another sweet spot, at least to me.
4GB (2x 2GB) Corsair XMS2 RAM - RAM is so inexpensive right now (only about $85 after rebate), I was tempted to get 2, and go up to 8GB. Reined myself in a little as that would be overkill.
Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 250 GB SATA3 drive - No need for a billion drives and terabytes of storage. Cool and quiet, all I need.
Samsung SATA DVD+/-RW drive - was going to use the old one, but why hang on to an IDE device when the new drive is only $27?
Corsair 450W PSU - Not filling up the box with a lot of power consuming extras. 1 drive, 1 low power consumption processor, 1 graphic card. 450W is plenty. It's quiet and runs cool.
Dell 2208WFP - 22" widescreen monitor. It's a TN panel which makes many people cry ("Oh noez lightbleed!") but my current Samsung is a TN and the bleed doesn't bother me much. Same monitor we got for Anna and I couldn't be more pleased.
Hardware is rounded out by a couple of quiet 120mm fans, and that's that. I'll be installing Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition - so far I've not had the issues with Vista that I'd feared. It runs smoothly, and hasn't caused any problems with any older games we've played on it so far, and WoW runs beautifully.
Looking forward to all the parts coming in. We've been very happy with Anna's computer in both power and noise level. Her old PC often sounded like a jet airplane under load. Next to her new one, my current machine now has taken on the jet airplane role. My new one is basically the same with a little more oomph in the processor, so the computer room should soon taken on a peaceful atmosphere.
Hers was also far easier of a build than my last machine was, so I'm hoping this one goes as smoothly. The only problem I experienced with Anna's was that on the first boot the CPU fan didn't want to spin up, but that problem magically disappeared. I freaked out, but I expect it this time. Hopefully no other bizarre problems will present themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment