How old is your PC and are you doing a new build in the next year?

So I am happy about the consolification of the industry, because it means I can play damn near any current title on my April 2008 PC (Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300, dual 8800GT SLI) at 1920x1200 with decent frame rate. And even better, this will almost certainly continue to be the case until the next console generation, with no upgrades. I’m totally digging Just Cause 2 right now – I have to crank down the AA and some of the fluffier options, but it still looks fucking fantastic. This is a wonderful thing because I have no money, having just bought a house and all.

So it makes me wonder what the current curve looks like among we Qt3 PC old-schoolers. Is your upgrade curve stretching out like mine? I just voted “<= 3 years, no rebuild”.

This question really applies to full system rebuilds – I am sure many of us are able to keep up with piecemeal upgrades, but that’s too many variations for a poll to capture. Still, back in the day plenty of us were doing new systems at most every two years…

I don’t know why but when I read your post I instantly thought “who is your daddy and what does he do.” - Arnold, kindergarden cop.

Well, my 4 month old PC just had its power supply die, but once I replace that it’ll be several years before I get one.

My PC is five years old and knocks wood still runs fine. Can’t run the latest games, of course, but can run games 2-3 years old just fine. I’ll probably build a new one in the next year or two.

And we just decided to save for another year since there are very few bargains for exactly what we’re looking for. I planned to hold out with just a 5850 for an upgrade, but now this means new PC, bitches!

Well, maybe. Depends what games come out this fall.

I technically built this PC about three years ago, but I upgraded the major components just last August. It runs everything I throw at it just fine, so I’m not expecting to do another build for at least a year, and maybe two. Game requirements don’t really seem to have gone up a lot lately though, aside perhaps from going multi-core (and I’m already prepared for that with a quad core), so it might last even longer.

Video cards seem to be the bottle neck more than anything else so I’ve been upgraded that as necessary. Games don’t appear to be CPU bound (though I can use more memory) so I don’t see the sense for a whole rebuild. I just added Radeon HD 5750 (to replace a 8600GT) that enable me to run JC2 (as opposed to a slide show).

I plan on upgrading the video card in the next year but that’s about it. I got my computer a year ago from Dell.

My quad core Dell is two years old now and seems to be fine with the games I’m playing even though I finally switched to a 1920/1200 native res monitor earlier this year. I may explore adding a better video card as the 9600GT is probably closest to being a liability as anything in the system, but that will depend.

My Core2Quad 2.4 clocked at 3.0, 4GB RAM is still well above what I need. I’ve had to update the video card (8800GT to a 4870x2) and subsequently the PSU in the last month or two, but nothing else since the initial build. I’m well happy!

My PC is 3 and half years old. It’s chugging along on most games at lower resolutions. Just Cause 2 was the first game it couldn’t outright play since it requires Direct X 10. The Final Fantasy XIV benchmark crashes even though it supposedly only required DirectX 9c.

Anyway, I’m going to be mostly poor for the foreseeable future (which is a rather long time), so the chances of an upgrade is pretty slim. It’ll be maybe 2-3 years before I see a new PC but it’s pretty good odds it’s going to be much longer than that.

My current PC was put together in the summer of 2007 and since then I’ve added a second HD and upgraded the monitor (from a 19" 1280x1024 to a 24" 1920x1200), the video card (from a 8800GTX to a GTX 260 Core 216) and OS (from Vista to Win7). It had 4GB of ram from the start and a Core 2 Duo CPU (3 GHz). It runs everything just fine and I have no pressing need (or conveniently, money!) to upgrade.

I may look into getting a new system sometime next year but it’s not really on the radar right now.

As a lifetime PC gamer, I was amazed at how great console games played on my huge HDTV with a great surround system. Plus, you just stick the game in and it works. And everyone has the exact same system as you online, so you don’t have to worry about adjusting detail to get more framerate. And no one can cheat. And you spend $400 for 5 years straight of awesome gaming.

I got my tax return this year, and thought what the hell, I’ll get a new PC so I can play all the stuff I’d missed out on.

I just spent a ton of money on a new box to replace my 5 year old PC.

It has given me nothing but problems (as evidenced in the threads I’ve posted).

It blue screens randomly and corrupts some file downloads. It could be the RAM, the videocard, the hard drive, the CPU, the PSU… who knows.

I sent it back to the place that built it to get it fixed, and went back to playing my no-hassle consoles.

Fucking PC gaming.

You should have bought a Stusserbeast ™. Those don’t fuck up.

My current box is almost three years old, and it’s doing quite well. A Q6600 overclocked a little bit, 8 GB of ram, with the only newer addition being a GTX 260 (with the extra cores).

It runs everything I throw at it, maybe not with all of the bells and whistles on, but with the vast majority of detail settings at higher levels. I still love building PCs, and don’t see myself stopping until PC gaming is like, super dead. But I’m not upgrading until there’s something I can’t get any other way.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve become more of a convert to consoles, simply because most of my nearby friends have them. And it is nice to have something that “just works”. It lets me be a bit more social with my wife, which is also nice.

PFffffff hahahaahahaha

I’m satisfied with my Mac at the moment but it definitely lacks oomph. I still haven’t forgiven Apple for releasing quad core processors a month after I bought a dual core on their assurance they weren’t going to upgrade any time soon but hey ho, I wont be upgrading for a while.

Ignoring games it does what I need (rather than what I want) capably and will do for a while yet. I’ve enjoyed the Mac experiment, but I’ll probably go back to a PC next time around. In my line of work I need windows and stuff like VMware just doesn’t quite do it on this hardware so I spend most of my time on this booting windows which seems to defeat the point of owning a Mac.

Recently got an i7 Macbook Pro and went hog-wild on it (240gb sandforce ssd and 8gb ram). But… I play games on my iPad ;p. I haven’t even fired up WoW lately. I’ll upgrade if they update to better GPUs next year.

My computer was about 18 months old when I bought it 2nd hand, about six years ago. Its age is starting to show a bit and I’ll probably replace it (with another 2nd hand computer) sometime in the next couple of years.

I’m content with this E6850 3GB RAM + 9800GTX and a fast HD. Can’t max out the latest and greatest (like Settlers 7 with its ridiculous after effects), but everything is perfectly playable… though being on a 1280x1024 helps.