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Posted
22 December 2004

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Nerd Factor X

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Hardware Upgrade

Hardware - ThumbnailAlthough I’ve almost entirely switched across to the PowerBook for most Serious Computing Tasks, I still keep a WinBox about the place for two very important pasttimes: gaming, and tinkering with hardware. These activities are not unrelated…

I’ve been building my own PCs for ages now. One thing you soon discover is that the various components become obsolete at different rates. However, instead of replacing the whole box, you replace just the components that are the biggest bottleneck (or should that be the smallest bottleneck? damn metaphors) between you and the stated objective: 60 frames per second.

So if you’re willing and able to put bits together you might end up never buying A Computer ever again. Instead you buy new components when the technology and financial stars are all aligned, and eBay the old ones. Explaining this to my accountant has always beein something of a challenge…

Half-Life 2 == component upgrade time. Click on the picture for more hardware pr0n. There you will see:

  • A nVidia 6600GT AGP video card
  • An AMD Athlon64 3200+ (or at least the massive heatsink sitting on top of it)
  • A Gigabyte motherboard with an nVidia nForce 3 Ultra chipset
  • A pair of Geil 512MB DDR modules with completely useless but cool-looking blue anodised aluminium heatsinks

[ Believe it or not, I took lots of photos, and that was the best one. I won’t tell you how many I took before I realised what I was doing: taking pictures of the inside of my computer for posting on my blog (!) Sometimes reality just comes crashing in… ]

The result? OMFG! Using 3DMark03 it benchmarks at 7630 3DMarks! (That’s OK, I think)

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