With Doom 3 upon us and Half-Life 2 quickly approaching, it’s time to take a stab at that Sisyphean task of keeping the deck up-to-date and able to play the latest and greatest (at high resolution with antialiasing and anistropic filtering enabled, of course).
My next leap:
| Component |
Current system |
New system |
| Motherboard |
i850E PCI |
i925 PCI-Express |
| CPU |
Intel Pentium 4 (2.66GHz, 512KB cache, 533MHz FSB) |
Intel Pentium 4 550 (3.4GHz HT, 1MB cache, 800MHz FSB) |
| System memory |
512MB Rambus RDRAM @1066MHz |
1GB Dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM @533MHz |
| Video card |
nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4600 (128MB DDR RAM) |
nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra Express (256MB DDR3 RAM) |
| Disk |
40GB EIDE disk (5400 RPM, 2MB cache) 40GB EIDE disk (5400 RPM, 2MB cache) |
160GB Serial ATA disk (7200 RPM, 8MB cache) |
| Optical Drives |
4x DVD±RW |
52x32x52x CD-RW 12x DVD±RW |
| Sound card |
Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer |
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 |
Unfortunately, due to constraints on the PCI-Express motherboard and 6800 Ultra Express, it looks like I won’t have the new box up, running, and scaring the crap out of me in Doom 3 until mid-to-late September.