July 10, 2010
First post. Excited, nervous, slightly itchy in a place that I can’t scratch because someone might see me and I’d be all embarrassed. Oh hey, it’s gone now. Sweet!
So I’ve done some preliminary thinking and comparison shopping, along with the requisite boning-up on the latest hardware developments and predictions for future trends. I have learned many things, and int he time that it would take to share them with you, at least half of them would have already become obsolete. Or at least old news.
First of all, I’m only considering Intel CPUs (as if you didn’t already know from one or two of my previous pages), and I’m 99.9% sure that I’m going with ATi for the video. I know that I’ve just alienated or enraged half of the PC gamers out there, and for that I am most abjectly unmoved. I don’t really feel like arguing about it, especially since I already know every single little pro and con by heart.
So that leaves me with a much smaller playing field: the Core i series CPUs and the Radeon 5000 series cards. I guess I could open it up to the last-generation 4000s too; I know more than a few clockers who can get amazing results out of the 4850 and 4870 especially, much better than many of the mainstream 5000 cards so far. However, the prices on the best of the 4000 series aren’t really that much better than most of the 5000s, so I feel like I could be getting a better-performing build with the 4000s but possibly shortchanging myself on the upgrade path in years to come. Always a trade-off!
My real dilemma right now is whether to go full-on x58 mobo and CPU, which requires a 1366 socket, or stick with the far more available-and-affordable P55 (1156 socket). My resistance to the bleeding edge is effectively negated by my desire to upgrade in small stages rather than replace the whole mobo and CPU in a year or two…