Been looking through the Atic site and have come up with a list of things I’d like to get for my wee little boxen someday. Some are pie in the sky, some are almost realistic. All are impractical.
- CPU
- In the realistic forum, we have a Duron 1.3ghz for a mere $60. Not bad eh? That would be a bandaid/hey this is cool/increase my cpu speed by 30% for cheap. A better choice would be the Athlon XP2200 ($235) or the XP2400 ($295). If I was go to Pentium I’d have to go with the P4 2.0A for $240. Nothing on the page indicates ready for dual though, but that leads me to…..
- Motherboard
I haven’t done a lot of research on motherboards lately, so I’m just going off what I see here and what I’ve heard a bit here and there through the grapevine. With AMD there is the A7V333-A (audio, AGP4x, support for 333mhz ram, and USB 2.0) for $169. Throw hardware raid 0,1 on and you’ve got the A7V333-RUF for $210. I can’t be sure of which other boards support AMD though. On the P4 side of things there are a lot of choices, most of which I’d go on simply based on what it’s got. Anyone have any suggestions/comments?
- Memory
- Memory falls in line next, and if I’m going to get a motherboard that supports 333mhz ram, dammit, I’m going to use it! Notice how we’re drawing away from the practicality of a $60 duron? Anyway, while a 1G stick of 333 ram is $610, two 512M sticks are $265 each. Sure, you can only fit three in most boards, so your max is 1.5G ram, but you’re saving $80 for 1G. Interestingly enough at Atic anyway the cost of a 1G stick of 266mhz ram is the same as 333mhz, but the 512M stick of 266 is $5 cheaper. Anyway, I’d want at least 512M.
- Hard Drives
- Not sure about the quality, but I can get a Western Digital 120G, 7200rpm, ATA100 with 8M of cache for $285. The only ATA133 drives at the Maxtors which only have 2M of cache and are shown as “hydraulic” (what does that mean?). Hard drive space is at a premium for me more these days than CPU or ram or any of the other stuff, so this would probably be my first choice if I had the money, or else I’d get myself a box of CD blanks to burn off some uhm…. “stuff” I’ve accumulated 🙂
- Video Card
- So many out there, and so many questions. I’ve been waiting on a new video card, or even dreaming about one until id releases Doom III (which if I were to have aquired a copy, which I didn’t, I’m sure it would run like shit on my current CPU/Card, but since I don’t have it, I can’t know that right?). However, assuming it’s released this century, and assuming they don’t simply say “you really should have a [insert card here] video card to run the game well”, I’d be looking at a couple of different ones. I know the ATI Radion 9700 is “the shit” right now, but at $530 it’s a bit pricey. The problem with ATI as well is that their Linux drives are unproven, unlike nVidia (though I do remember hearing rumors of some linux development coming down the pipe). The more realistic card from ATI would be the Radeon 8700 Fire-GL with 64MB DDR ram for $190, but I have no idea on the specs or benchmarks for this card.
The nVidia cards that are at the top of the unrealism scale are the GForce 4 Ti4600 with 128M DDR ram for $380 (more realistic than the ATI high end that’s for sure) and approaching realistic would be the Ti4200 or Ti4200-Turbo for $225 and $275 respectively. Both with 128M DDR ram as well.
But like I said, I’m not going to do anything with any video card until it gets a blessing from The Carmack.
That’s really about it for hardware upgrades. I’d move the new stuff into my main work box, move the old hardware into either my windows box or Firefly’s system (though the speed bump for her would be negligible).
Anyway, there’s a bit of a pie in the sky wish list, but hey, I’m allowed to dream right?