EVE Blog Banter #68: If I show you my rig, will you show me yours?

They say "Better late than never..." Well that's all fine and dandy, but it makes for a shitty first impression. Or in this case, for a shitty re-introduction. I wanted to jump back into the  EVE Blog Banters, my child of yesteryears, who's all grown up and soon turning six, with a BANG! But the Blog Father is bit rusty, and three days late will have to do!

Enough ramblings (damn, I AM getting old!).

Out with the Old, In with the New: A PC Upgrade Story

Before I get into the details of the new rig I'm about to put together, let's take a trip down remembrance lane.

I first heard about EVE Online sometime circa 1999-2000. At the time I was working at IBM and had jut gone from a Mac to an IBM PC300 tower. I could run Diablo at an average setting, but that machine wasn't what you would call a PC Gamer's Dream Machine, far from that! Really far... as in far far away in an other galaxy kind a distance.

Fast forward to 2002, when I finally got EVE and put it onto that machine, I believe it ran at about a frame a minute. And I'm being generous here! Suffice to say, this gamer needed a better rig. And so began the quest to build myself a PC. After reading profusely various computer power user magazines and books, I finally put together a decent system (at the time). It ran a P4, 500Mb of RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro (after an early upgrade from a 9200).

Over the next few years, the system would see some much needed improvements, as well as an unforeseen mobo replacement. The last major upgrades being a replacement of the 9800 Pro for an XFX GeForce 7600 GT, 256 MB DDR3, 580MHz, AGP 8x and then maxing out the P4 with a 3.2GHz. Suffice to say when the system finally failed a few months ago, I was in need of a much better gaming rig!

Which brings me to earlier this week, when I finally placed my order with NCIX.com. Having discussed my needs with a few gaming buddies at work, and after getting the advice of Mathieu Bourgie (@MathieuB), author of Hardware Revolution, I finally placed my order for the following:

• AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition Dual Core 3.1GHZ 7MB Cache
• Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3 PCI-E16 2PCI SATA2 RAID 1394 HD Sound GBLAN
• G.SKILL PC2-6400 4GB 2X2GB DDR2-800 240PIN Dual Channel Memory Kit
• XFX Radeon HD 4870 750MHZ 1GB 3.6GHZ GDDR5 PCI-E 2XDVI HDCP
• Corsair VX450 450W ATX 12V 33A 24PIN ATX Active PFC 120MM Fan
• Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB 7200RPM 32MB Dual Proc SATA 3.5IN
• Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64BIT DVD with Win7 Upgrade Offer

Add that the 3 items I'm keeping from my old PC:

• Antec SX1040BII Black Performance Series II SOHO File Server (without the PSU)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS 320GB Hard Drive
• Plextor PX-716SA 16x DVD DL SATA Burner

Before placing my order, I checked for the best pricing using PriceCanada.com and then using NCIX's price matching, was able to save $60! Too bad for NewEgg.ca which doesn't offer price matching!

Everything shipped last night, except for the processor. Hopefully it'll be on its way soon!