My New Rig

[Big Gulp]

Just ordered from Newegg....

Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2.8 Ghz
It's dual core, and substantially cheaper than a comparable C2D at only $159.  Benchmarked quite well, and I like to support the underdog.

Radeon X1950 Pro
I was dead set on nabbing myself an 8600 card just so I'd be DX10 ready, but after doing some reading up on the DX10 midrange card's performance I was really underwhelmed.  They all perform like ass.  I'll be damned if I'll pony up what they want for an 8800 GTX, I'd sooner just buy a PS3.  In any case, when affordable, decent DX10 cards get released I'll pick one up.  For right now, this easily whoops the ass off my X850 for a paltry $130

2 Sticks of 2GB DDR2 800 RAM
If I've learned anything over the years, it's that a metric fuckload of RAM can spackle over other computer deficiencies.  Oh yeah, and I'm ashamed to admit this, but I still only have regular old DDR in my current computer, so I had to get new RAM.

MSI VIA K8M890 Motherboard
Yeah, I cheaped out on this one.  Fact is, though, that I've used el-cheapo MSI motherboards in the past with no problems.  Saw no reason to rock the boat, here.  Plus, this is one of the few modern mobos that still have 2 IDE ports, and considering most of my HDs are still of the old PATA type, I wanted a mobo that would still support them and have SATA ports available.

New Heatsink/Fan
Nothing too fancy, but looks like it'll do the job.



I'll be bringing over my soundcard, since that's still damned good (Creative X-Fi Audio), my power supply is more than sufficient at 750W, and my burner will go as well.  I'll also be bringing over my hard drives, which are nothing fancy, but cumulatively give me more space than God.  I have 3 internal drives, and one external USB drive, which all told come out to just shy of a terrabyte.

So what do you guys think?  $600 well spent?

[WayAbvPar]

That is pretty nice for $600. Now come over and install it on my PC pls kthx.

[Sky]

You're right about dx10 testing, things are looking shabby right now. Not sure if that's due to it being tacked-on at this juncture, or if they can't optimize it or what. But I bought my 8800 for fastyness, so I'm not too worked up about it. And it's the high end, so it's only mediocre in dx10, about where I thought it'd be...The ATI card you got should kick sufficient ass, especially for the price.

The computer I upgraded earlier this year was also DDR, a paltry 768MB. 2GB DDR2 feels so much nicer.

[Baldrake]

I have an 8600 GTS on my machine, and am actually very happy with it. I also had no interest in paying for an 8800 when it'll be half the price in 6 months.

But the joke is, the 8600 won't fully support DirectX 10.1. Early adoption is teh shit.

EDIT: GTS not GT...

[Engels]

I considered going for an AMD 95nm chip to get to DDR2 instead of an intel c2d, but for ~60 more I got me a E6750 C2D and I'm pretty happy with it. Let me know how the MSI board works. I got me one of them fancy Gygabyte boards, and indeed, not only does it only have one PATA IDE port, but its integrated into a Gigabyte Raid controller chip, which means that you have to load a secondary raid controller (aside from the ICHR9 default Intel raid controller) just to get the danged CD Rom to work.