It’s been roughly two years since my last major PC upgrade, so I thought based on the fact I don’t intend upgrading for another two years or so, I’d make it a good one. My initial plan was to hold out until early next year – Windows Vista was slated to come out then, so I’d buy a whole new PC around then with Vista. Vista has since been pushed back until 4th quarter, so I decided I’d just go ahead and buy a new PC anyway.
I started off looking at buying a whole PC, pre-built. I’d decided to get an AMD processor, and I started looking at Mesh’s offerings. Based on their prices, and other prices, I decided there wasn’t much in it, and I could for a little less build my own. Being the DIY kind of guy that I am, I thought I’d do that.
So off I went, and researched everyting I wanted. I chose the components to all fit together nicely. I knew what spec I wanted, and what features, I just had to find the kit to do it. Somewhere along the line I managed to screw up slightly though. I use Firewire quite a bit – my iPod connects with it, and I have a few external hard drives I connect via Firewire. When looking at motherboards, I was making sure they included Firewire, and the case I bought had a front Firewire socket. The motherboard I eventually chose (Asus A8N-E for those who care) doesn’t have any onboard firewire, so I’ve had to resort to buying a seperate Firewire card and cable to connect it to the case.
Additional annoyance came from the fact this case uses 120mm and 92mm fans, whilst I managed to buy two 80mm fans I can’t use. I could use them in another PC as they are low-noise units. Still, I was a bit miffed.
So here’s the whole spec:
AMD Athlon 64 x2 4400+, 1MB cache
2GB PC3200 RAM
1 x 80GB Seagate SATA
2 x 300GB Seagate SATA
Geforce 6600GT 256MB PCI-express
Creative X-Fi Platinum
Liteon CD-RW/DVD combo
Liteon DVD-RW, Dual Layer
Quite a nice PC I think. It’s pretty quick, although once I load all my rubbish onto it, there’s a noticeable slowdown. My theory is that when Vista comes out, It’ll run it without coughing, whilst my older machine would probably groan a bit by then. Still, it’s my Christmas present to me 
. Well – you have to!
