Hundred Hand

If you know me, you may know that I upgrade my computer pretty much every 2 years like clockwork. While I would like to upgrade every time a new exciting component comes out, my 2 year rule is the contract I make with myself that keeps me from overspending. I also believe that if you’re on a set budget, and you want to keep your computer as current as possible, you get the most bang for your buck by spending a moderate amount of money at set intervals. So through the course of my college career I spent about $1200 combined for two upgrades, and my computer stayed nice and fast. Very different from my sister, who got a $3000 computer her freshman year, and then didn’t replace it until 4 years after it had been outdated, long after graduating.

Well I’m bending the rules a bit this week and getting a new graphics card six months early, but for a good reason. I’ve been having computer issues lately. As far as I can tell, my video card is dead, at least according to the beeps my computer is making; long short short. I’ll probably take a hit to my nerd cred for this, but I didn’t have any spare video cards around to use as a test case, and my motherboard had no integrated video. However, after completely removing my old card, with no change in error, it either has to be that my video card was bad, or my motherboard has lost the ability to detect video cards, aka “fucked”. Because I’m an optomist, I’m banking on it being the former, and I ordered a new card. According to the internet, it has just arrived at my apartment, and I can’t wait to go home and stick it in.

This comes right around the point that I could use a new card anyway. There are a couple places where I could tell my old card wasn’t cutting the mustard. First, I played through Dragon Age: Origins, which is a very cool game; but like a loser I had to turn my resolution down to 1600×1000 from 1920×1200 because the frame rate would get really bad during large battles or when there were a lot of environmental effects going on. In WoW, it was taking quite a while for people to load whenever I teleported to the major city (Dalaran for those of you that play). Also, I’ve been playing through Final Fantasy X on a PS2 emulator lately, and at certain points the frame rate will drop, and the background music slows down and characters start speaking slower; it’s just a pain.

The card that I ended up going with is this, a Radeon 4890. It was $210 bucks, comes with an aftermarket cooler already attached, and should have about double the performance of my old 8800gt, which cost $270 a year and a half ago. I was seriously considering going up to the Radeon 5 series, where I could get about 50% more performance for twice the price, but it just seemed unnecessary. Also, I’m trying hard to build a fairly quiet computer, and the card I chose seemed to be less of a power hog, which means less heat, which means less cooling, which means less noise.

If this new card doesn’t fix my problem, then I’m just going to ditch my plan and upgrade everything else, since swapping out a motherboard means swapping everything. Personally I can’t wait to add a couple more cores to my processor, and bump up my ram now that I don’t have that stupid 2 gig limit from old versions of Windows. Choosing an SSD is going to be a tough decision though. That one I should give a little time for prices to settle down.