Today’s the day I’ll finally be upgrading my old beast of a system to the new latest and greatest. Err…almost greatest anyway. Well, okay it’s pretty good. I’ve been contemplating this for awhile while playing CoD4 and having my frame rates in the mid to low 40’s and very common drops into the single digits - I knew I wanted it. But I waited, now with more games on the horizon and most all of them requiring more state of the art systems, I decided it was time.
I’m moving for the first time in about 10 years back to an Intel based system. I’ve been a big fan of AMD but on recommendations from squadmates who have them, I’m going to the Intel Dual Core processor series. Of course, I went balls out and got the E8500 processor - the fastest available in that series and marrying that to a EVGA 680i motherboard with 4 gigs of OCZ memory. I skimped a little on the video card, but not much. I wanted the Nvidia 9800 GX2 series card with the 1GB of onboard video ram but ended up getting a 9800 GTX with only 512mb. Still a big improvement over my old ATI x800 with 256mb.
Either way, you add up all that system ram, cache and video ram and you’re going over 4GB of total available ram - which is the limit on a 32 bit based Windows XP system - so I’m graduating up to a 64 bit version of XP to accomodate the extra ram and take advantage of the Intel 64 architecture on my new CPU which allows for greater access to larger amounts of extended virtual and physical memory. I’ll have the new system up and running sometime today (whenever Mr. UPS man arrives) and will put up a reply here about my frame rate gains in CoD4 and other general improvements. I’m salvaging my twin raptor 10k RPM hard drives off of my old system. I haven’t been able to convince my wife yet that I need a solid state drive. Soon!
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