A big raise at work allowed me to have some extra money to build a new rig almost from the ground up. Just my 240GB 7200 RPM harddrive, 550w PSU and my 21in monitor was carried over from my old Athlon. All of those were purchases to replace parts that crapped out in the last couple years. I also for the first time in years went in intel. My goal was to build a really sweet gaming rig and not break the bank. Motherboard : EVGA nForce 750i FTW I like my motherboards simple yet reliable. I went a little higher than what I wanted to spend here because I wanted a SLI compatible motherboard and this one fit the bill the best for the price. When I bought it there was also a $30 mail in rebate. CPU : Intel Dual Core E8400 It was really between this and a Q6600. In the end almost nothing gets the full use out of a quad core processor right now so I settled on this. Easily Overclockable as well. This runs soooo much cooler than my old Athlon FX-53. RAM : OCZ 4 GB DDR2 800 Dual Channel Kit I was thinking about going with a DDR2 1066, but these I got for $50 after a $30 mail in rebate. Cheap! The 1066 4GB kits were twice that. So I suffer a little bit in performance, but not many programs use all 4GB. I OCed these up to 1000mhz and they run stable. Anything higher and I get memory blue screens. Video Cards 2x MSI NX8800GT 512 MB These. Cards. ROCK. Every game I play I can max out now and see no peformance decreases even at higher resolutions. This is really where I saw the biggest jump. Initially I was going to keep my two 7600GTs and use them, but they turned into such a bottleneck I went ahead and plunked down for them. After two mail in rebates I got get for $175 each. All in all I spent less on this rig than I did buying just the processor for my last system and this sccccrrrreeeeaaaammmmsss. Once I get my hands on a better air cooler for my processor I want to experment OCing that more. The E8400 seems to take OCing well. All in all Age of Conan runs at 60 to 150 fps almost all the time. At first I dual booted Vista 64 and XP figuring I would hate Vista. But you know what? Once you turn off the annoying things like Defender and admin popups and windows update self rebooting the machine, Vista runs pretty damn nice.
Yah, only 3 GB shows up in XP, which is why I decided to give Vista a try. Now I find I rarely boot into XP. Only go there when I need to run something that needs 16 bit support.
Actually if you are running 32-bit Vista, it still doesn't use 4GB of RAM. Although a recent patch changes it to "show" that you have 4GB installed when you view system properties, it doesn't actually use all of it.
