Guest Blogged by Tim Garcia

Well Slayer mentioned that I like to upgrade my PC every three weeks but I wish I only could do that. lol Pretty much as soon as you get a new upgrade it is out of date within a few weeks but luckily most products are not able to use the newest technologies that are out there so that gives current products a fairly long shelf life. I am always looking to see what upgrades are out there and I mostly look at Tiger Direct and Newegg to see what is new and check out the prices.

Here is my current configurations of my PC’s and wanted upgrades.

Current System: Main PC (Built system December 2007)

• OS: XP Pro 64bit

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X@ Dual Core Processor 6400+ Black Edition

• RAM: 3 Gigs OCZ Reaper Dual Channel 2048MB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz

• Video Card: 2 SLI XFX GeForce 8800GT XXX 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 Alpha Dog Edition

• Motherboard: MSI K9N SLI Platinum AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard

• Hard Drive: 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB Hard Drive - 7200, 16MB, SATA-300

• Power Supply: OCZ/GameXStream /700-Watt/ATX/120mm Fan

Wanted Upgrades:

• CPU: AMD Phenom X4 9850 Quad Core Processor

• HD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB Hard Drive - 7200RPM, 32MB, SATA-300

Current System: Secondary PC (Built Approximately 2003-04)

• OS: XP Pro

• CPU: AMD Athlon 1050.0 MHz

• RAM: 1.25 Gigs

• Video Card: ATI Radeon 9500 128MB

• Motherboard: MSI (not sure which model, too lazy to find out).

• Hard Drive: Multiple Maxtor hd’s. Max size of largest hd is 40GB

Wanted Upgrades:

• CPU: Replace with Main PC CPU

• RAM: I have 1 gig of OCZ Reaper available

• Video Card: XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Video Card - 256MB DDR3 (maybe)

• Motherboard: MSI K9N SLI-F Motherboard

• Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB Hard Drive - 7200, 16MB, Serial ATA-300

• DVD Drive: Lite-On 20x LH-20A1L DVD±R with 12x DVD-RAM with Lightscribe

• Power Supply: ThermalTake/PurePower/600-Watt/ATX 2.2/120mm Fan

I am a big believer in AMD, MSI, XFX and Seagate products. CPU wise, Intel makes some good CPU’s but they are overpriced IMO. I think gamer’s prefer AMD over Intel and that is because the frame rates are usually higher then Intel CPU’s and that is what matters when you are playing a game. If you want to overclock your CPU then AMD is the way to go, depending if you have a good cooling system, motherboard and power supply. I haven’t overclocked my system much because I really don’t need to; there really is no game out there that my system can’t handle. I know that these upgrades that I chose are not all top of the line but like I said before, products have a good shelf life and I am getting quality and value at the same time. It will be awhile before I could actually get all the upgrades but the longer I wait the more prices will go down.

If you have any suggestions or anything else then please leave a comment, I would appreciate any feedback.