Keeping your gaming PC up-to-date is always pain; tech is entering and exiting the market at such speed that state-of-the-art machine bought in January is out of date as the autumn comes. Investing into more memory and new generation graphics cards may help for a while, but eventually the entire system needs to be upgraded, again.
I used to build my own PCs; starting from the AT/286 generation (the first PC after leaving the trusty Commodore 64), tweaking memory in various varieties of 386 and 486, I have had my fair share of IRQ conflicts, motherboard-memory-processor compatibility issues, driver issues, overclocking and processor-burning experiences. No time for that any more.
Yesterday I did finally put in the order for my next PC. After not-so-thorough review round, I ended up getting the “Jimm’s Pro Gamer SE” setup from Jimm’s PC Store, who has profiled themselves as a gamers’ PC shop. The specks should be enough for a while at least: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, 2 GB of DDR2 memory, 500 GB disk, nVidia 8800GTS graphics card. The chassis is Cooltek Storm, with a 25 cm fan in the side — hopefully a silent and efficient cooling solution. At 1199 euros it still fits my budget, but I need to prepare for numerous software and possibly peripheral updates as well. The new primary operating system for this set will be Windows Vista Home Premium Edition (due to the gaming and media editing use), but a multiple OS setup is also an option. The delivery time appears rather slow though; they promised 1-3 weeks, and it might be that they are out of parts, so lets see how this finally works out.
frans goes blog 