Friday, January 02, 2009

a new year, a new cpu! desktop upgrade time.

happy 2009! hopefully a year of rebirth for our nation and each of us!

i started this new year off by scoring a few decent deals on a few upgrades to my desktop rig.  last year i didn't really upgrade too much since i moved gaming platforms back to consoles (PS3 and late wii) and in a way burned myself out of upgrades/system building the year prior (went through about 8 cases, 6 mobos, 4 vid cards in one year).  however the super low costs of memory and 3ghz dual core processors really got my upgrade-sense a twitching.  in addition, i have fully transitioned all my machines from XP to Vista and actually am enjoying it over XP (vista's not that bad people, get over it!)



my main needs for a desktop are:

-video encoding/transcoding/authoring

-photo editing/resizing/photoshop etc

-file-serving/hosting (main fileserver for rest of local network to get data from)

-basic gaming pc (do latest games but on lowest settings, nothing crazy good)

-playback hd content via hdmi

-do normal pc stuff (email, internet, etc)

osx and ubuntu support are not required (i've abandoned both for my desktop os, more novelty than productivity for my desktop; laptops different story).

i debated between Intel and AMD and actually went with AMD this time (prefer intels for my portables though).  i was able to score a AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (3.1ghz per core, dual core) w/psu for around $55 on neweg and then got a new asus mobo for about $90(8gb max mem support and hdmi output w/asus hybrid sli) and finally 8gb of kingston memory for around $90 :P

i should get my upgrades by end of next week (saved on shipping since i'm in no hurry); i'll post and update on how she runs!

seriously though, who doesn't want to try to run a system w/8GB of RAM!!!!! and yes, this will require Vista x64.  also, 3ghz per core is pretty impressive too!

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