New Year = New Computer

Happy New Year!!!

Well in the spirit of change from 2006 to 2007, I decided to dedicate any Holiday money towards updating my home computer system. I knew that the Core 2 Duo's were the hot ticket this season and being an enthusiast, knew about their excellent overclocking potential. So obviously I had decided on the CPU, but what about the other components? Its been about 2 years since my delve in to the overclocking world and its been well over 5 years since my purchase of an intel based system (crazy I know).

So I spent about a week's worth of research on Toms Hardware, Hard OCP, and other hardware related sites to figure out which combo of parts will give me the best bang for the buck. I finally had decided on the following items (based upon peoples reviews and articles that used these components in overclocking the Core 2 Duos):

Intel E6300 Core 2 Duo @ 1.86Ghz
Gigabyte 965P-S3 ATX Motherboard
1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMS Dual Channel DDR2
Wester Digital 250GB SATA2 HDD

I wavered back and forth on the video card. Toms Hardware has excellent articles on which video cards are the best for various price ranges and at the time, the one said to be the best for the ~$180 price range was the ATI X1950 Pro. Well I was looking around the net and couldn't find one card under $200. In fact they were all around $220. Too expensive unfortunately (I did have strict budget). I went back to the article and noticed that it had been updated! The new king for the price range was the nVidia 7900GS. According to the article the change was due to the inability of the author to find a 1950 Pro for the designated price :) I doubled checked around the net and the 1950 appeared to perform the same as the 7900GS so I was set.

So I gather all the components, pieced it together and installed Oblivion as soon as I could. I instantly noticed an amazing increase in performance based upon the fact that the auto config put the quality at ULTRA :) Suffice to say that the new hardware really does wonders on games!

I haven't yet tried to overclock seeing as though my current performance is much better than any of the games I currently own can throw at it. I'll have to run some benchmarks soon to let ya'll know of the baselines that I am getting. Then its off to attempt some overclocking and see what this Core 2 Duo is really made of.

Laterz