For at least 7-8 years I’ve been in the habit of upgrading my main pc roughly every 12-18 months. I broke that pattern this time around because of a variety of things – the supposed transition to 64bit computing, changes to cpu socket architectures (first I was waiting for amd socket 754, then 939) and the actual transition away from agp to pcix for graphics cards. The fact that my trusty AMD 2400 and Radeon 9800 Pro were basically capable of running every game I wanted to run at a reasonable framerate and resolution also kept me from feeling like I needed to upgrade.

That all changed about a month ago when I bought a 20.1″ widescreen LCD monitor. Suddenly my framerates were in the single digits and it was time to get serious about building a new box. One 1 gallon jug of change rolled up and deposited later and I had all my components. I was ready to replace my 2.5 year old machine with something new.

In terms of components, this time around I went with 2 gigs of DDR Dual CHannel CAS 2.5 ram, an AMD 64 3200 Venice core, an Asus PCIx Radeon X80XL, and an nforce4-basedAbit AN8 Ultra. I also got a couple of hard drives (a 250gb sata drive and a 300 gb ata100 drive), the idea being to retire the system volume in the existing gaming rig and use its 200gb data drive as a not-to-be-relied-upon download drive – these drives are used 24×7 and the boot volume was several years old so out to pasture it goes, and the data drive I figure will kick sometime over the next year or so. I stuck with my existing case, but got a new power supply for it after I discovered that some (all?) pcix motherboards require an extra 4 pin power adapter that my old power supply didn’t have.

Assembly and time till first post was faster than any rig I’ve ever built – the abit board is superb and has a handy 2-digit lcd readout on it to help diagnose what’s going on during post – it clued me in that I needed to activate usb keyboard and mouse support in the bios before the system would boot, for example, as well as pointing out several other issues as I brought the board up, but anyway the long and short was things have never gone smoother.

The windows install as uneventful, the only gotcha I ran into was that windows saw the 250gb drive as only being 125gb, shades of the old large volume support from two generations ago. This wasn’t a problem since once I’d updated the IDE drivers it saw the whole thing and I had intended to partition the drive anyway. Within about 4 hours of hardware assembly I had a fully functional windows box with a few of my favorite games on it (it’s all about the red orchestra, baby!

All seemed well for the first couple of days as I proceeded to install the main software layer onto the box, ie all my apps. Fortunately I was doing this for an hour or two after work each night and hadn’t gotten very far before disaster struck. I hadn’t seen a blue screen of death in literally years when suddenly it was bsod’s all over the place. The machine wouldn’t run for more than a few minutes before I would get one. Normally this is an indication of hardware failure but I had just updated the motherboard drivers and installed battlefield 2 (which has voip server software) so my first thought was software layer, but even booting in safemode I would get bsod’s within a few minutes of logging in. Long and the short of it was I ended up tearing down and rebuilding the box twice before I finally figured out it was an issue with nvidia’s utter piece of crap hardware firewall. I didn’t actually figure this out until I had blown away the windows install and started from scratch though. The whole experience basically cost me a week as I tinkered each night after work.

Years ago I used to do my own oil changes and routine maintenance on my car, but at a certain point I concluded that I made enough money to not have to deal with the mess and aggravation of doing it and started paying the dealerships for service. I’m close to getting to that point with PCs. The final bill for the machine was about $1,200-$1,300. I’ll recoup some of that as I sell off the retired components on ebay (anyone need an abit nfs7 rev 2.0 motherboard?), and the change jar contributed $650 towards the costs, but the hassle of going through it all is starting to not be worth it. I absolutely love the finished product – 1680×1050 at high fps across all my games, super responsiveness from the system – but for a few hundred dollars more I could have gotten a comparable system from someone like Alienware of Falcon Northwest, or I could have gone for a disposable computer from dell and juiced it up a bit, possibly even for a bit cheaper. We’ll see where I’m at the next time I’m ready to seriously upgrade – another $10k or so in my annual salary and dude, I’ll be getting a dell.

(of course having said that, in the immediate term the components from the old box have a cascade effect down my other systems – the media rig gets a better video card, cpu and more ram, all from the old gaming rig, and then the stuff that comes out of the media box is going into the server that will replace my incredibly aged and holding on by the bits of its core dual celeron based red hat server, so I have literally months of bit twiddling ahead of me).