With Windows 7 being released soon (less than two weeks away now, for us MSDN members), I figured it was time to consider upgrades for my main PC, so that I don’t have to mess with hardware changes post-install. Some upgrades are already essentially here — with the recent order of my backup drives, I’ve got a couple spare drives with plenty of space for games and apps, and I have another 4GB of RAM that I’d snuck into that same order.
I’d thought about upgrading the video card, but it felt a bit early since it wasn’t so long ago that I’d installed this one and my previous card lasted almost four years. But then I realized that, um, April 2007 was over two years ago, dumbass… It doesn’t feel like I’ve had it that long though, for some reason. The CPU is also starting to be a bottleneck in some cases too (I’m looking at you, GTA4), so it could use a bit of a bump as well.
I don’t really feel like going all-out with a completely new system though, especially since a Core i7 CPU would also require a new motherboard and expensive memory, so this is only an interim upgrade and the next one will be the big one. I’m going for good performance/price ratios rather than raw performance, so I finally settled on getting a Q9550 CPU and a Radeon 4870 video card. They should easily tide me over at least a couple more years.
I’m also going to try to add another 120mm fan into the case. The drives run a little bit warm, and these new parts aren’t going to make things any cooler…