So I Built Myself A New Gaming PC
I recently rebuilt my PC with all new hardware (new motherboard, CPU, RAM, eventually a big terabyte hard drive, and most importantly a NICE video card). As a result I’ve been spending more time gaming on my PC. I more or less quit gaming about 3 years ago after I started using Ubuntu more instead of Windows. No, I didn’t really hold back on gaming because of Ubuntu (I still had Windows installed and could easily fire it up if I felt like playing), but I stopped because my hardware really sucked. Not only that but there weren’t really many games on the market that seemed to be worth a damn, so I didn’t have much incentive to spend money on hardware. Holding off for a few extra years helped me concentrate more on learning a new operating system in the meantime and saved me a lot of money on new hardware.
In short, I think I’ve put about $300 into all the hardware and it’s more than capable of playing Crysis as well as future games based upon the id Tech 5 engine. The card I purchased is a nVidia 9600GSO with 756MB of video RAM (yes, the card came with that silly door hanger pictured above). The amount of RAM alone is 3 times more than any card I’ve ever had in the past so I knew I would likely be very satisfied with its capabilities, and I have been VERY satisfied. The CPU is an AMD X2 (Dual Core) 5600 (2.9 Ghz per core). After doing some tests (video conversion in particular) the system appears to be just a hair over 4 times faster than my old setup. I’d write more… but I got some gaming to do.
Saturday, December 13th, 2008