Anytime I rebuild my PC, I tend to start asking myself if it’s time to upgrade any other components in my system. I don’t need to have the fastest system in the world, but I do like to be as productive as possible, and not fall behind the curve. At the moment, I’m still where I liked to be, which is surprising considering my computer is 3+ years old.  In fact, not only is is still keeping me fairly happy, but it’s also still outclocking most of the other computers in my life. Just to summarize what’s in it at the moment:
- An I7 2.6 Ghz Quad Core processor (this is the component showing it’s age these days).
- 12 GB of Triple Channel Ram 1066mghz
- Nvidia GeForce 260 with 1GB Vid Ram (This is also showing it’s age, but gaming isn’t the highest priority for me anymore, so it’s still handling everything I want to play… Namely WoW and Diablo 3 starting next week).
- Over 8 TB of Hard drives in Raid 1 (so over 4TB Usable).
- Over 300GB in SSD all running well over the 500MB/second line thanks to 2 very high end raid cards (Adaptec 6805 anyone?)
That said, it took Intel until just recently to upgrade the “Enthusiast” line of processors. But now that they have, I’m seriously tempted to replace my motherboard, processor, and ram (I’d probably still wait on the graphics card). What would that get me? Well…
- SIX cores with HT running at 3.2Ghz… Oh the video rendering time would be amazing…
- Probably either 16GB of Quad Channel Ram or 32GB… not really sure.
- Faster Bus and Memory speeds, with Native Sata6 and USB3 support (although my raid card does sata6 already, so I’m good there)
- More PCIe x16 Slots (not needed… yet… but if I upgrade my graphics cards they will be).
Really though, it’s the processor speed that I’m bringing into question. The sad part is, that a majority of the video rendering that I do is in a program called Camtasia. Camtasia hasn’t added support for more than 2 cores yet, which makes additional cores pointless for now. I don’t stand to gain much other than MGHZ, (which I could probably get now simply by over clocking). So that is probably my decision right there for now… Maybe Christmas will bring a JR bonus of a faster machine… Until then, I’ll just have to sit in awe of 6 core machines.
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I remember my parent’s computer in 1995 had 120 megabytes of hard drive space. I think about that sometimes when I download an album at 80 megabytes.
Time sure flies by, doesn’t it?
And then there were the computers that didn’t even have hard drives… and just booted up off of disks… But yeah, I still from time to time have flashbacks to the first machine I used daily in my life (Windows 98, 2GB of HDD prior to upgrade)… Nothing like Dialup + WS_FTP :-).
Nvidia Radeon…
That’s your problem right there. 😉
Fixed… Although, I would love to have a card that was both.