I am about to start a serious PC upgrade - I may be offline a while.

I am looking into a shipping carton that contains a shiny new motherboard, processor, ram and disk drive. Within the next few hours I will hopefully have completed a major upgrade of this my main gaming PC. Of course these things don't always go as planned so wish me luck.

I am also taking this opportunity to finally migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7. XP has served me well since 2002 and I remain genuinely fond of it. I think it stands out as the best operating system Microsoft has ever made but all good things come to an end and the time has come to move on is now. I managed to avoid Windos Vista entirely but I have been using 64 bit Windows 7 on my laptop for a few months without problems so I am hopeful it will serve me as well on my gaming rig.

Another novelty for me is that this will be the first time ever my main gaming rig has an Intel processor. I have been building and using AMD rigs for the last 15 years (from AMD 586 through to an Athlon 64X2) but I was tempted over to the dark side by Intel's I5-760. Intel appear to have a considerable technical lead over AMD at this point in time and the I5 range which is only a mid range processor for Intel offers comparable gaming performance to AMD's top end parts but with considerably lower power consumption. AMDs parts are probably still slightly cheaper especially when you take the motherboard into consideration but lower processor power consumption is a lovely thing to have with knock on impacts on cooling and power supply requirements.

Comments

Benita Bolland said…

Upgrading your computer is a good decision. Game developers aren’t slowing down in making new games with high specification requirements, so upgrading is definitely a good idea, maybe even necessary. A lower power processor would mean less chances of overheating, which is good for the system and the hardware. I think using either Windows 7 over Vista is also a good choice.

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