A New Computer (But Not For Me)

A few months ago a buddy of mine said he wanted a “new computer”. He’s not a real techy guy so extracting what he actually wanted was a bit hard. “Something that plays games” is pretty ambiguous, so it ended up coming down to how much he wanted to spend “I donno” and what he wanted included (IE: did he need just a new box or did he want monitor/keyboard/mouse/speakers, etc). After some prodding, and a call to my favorite computer store in vancouver (Phase 1, whom I have no affiliation with other than I occassionally buy stuff from there…. oh, and they also finally put their pricelist online…. yay!) I came back to him with a price for a rig.

For an AMD64-3700 (2.21 Ghz) / 1G ram / GeForce 7600 GT / 250G SATA / 17″ Acer LCD Monitor / MS Wireless Keyboard and mouse….. $1500 CND. Discusting. For the hardcore hardware junkies out there, I know this rig isn’t going to blow the big boys away, but it sure as hell blows my xp2600 / 1 G / ATI Radon 9800 PRO away in the couple of quick uhmm… “game tests” I installed over the long weekend (buddy is away until monday luckily, so I’ve had the last 3 days to play). Besides, I could probably give him my current system and he’d be happy as a clam with it and never know the difference… damn morals!

If I had a job right now or income of any sort coming in I’d have told the dude at the store to make up two of these systems for me, but until EI kicks in and/or that contract work I have bills in for pays up, I’ll be happy with what I have.

Still, $1500 for a complete rig? Geeeezz…..

I did get a little something out of it though, buddy bought me a set of Zalman 5.1 surround sound headphones. He doesn’t know it yet, but he did 🙂 Of course, of the two computers I have the one with the 5.1 onboard audio is in the non-gaming box, so today I did some surgery and swapped the MB from my linux box with the windows box. Luckily the two are the same nforce2 chipset, so windows didn’t freak out and demand a reinstall / repair.