I’m going to drop a quad core Phenom II in my box next time I can afford something like that. Should hold me for a while.
Five years old, and I’m going to buy a new one this weekend.
While I can actually run Fallout 3 on my machine despite not meeting the minimum requirements, I’d rather have (A) the game actually look good, and (B) be able to use VATS without waiting for seemingly half a minute every time I want to target a body part. :D
I picked up an E8400, 4 GB RAM and a 4850 almost exactly two years ago, and I haven’t touched that since. I’ll be getting a bigger HDD, but that’s for ripping most of my DVD collection. And although I still enjoy looking at builds, I feel no desire to get a new computer.
My desktop is YEARS old at this point. Like, prolly 6. Haven’t tried to game on it in a while, I think it’s got some issues I don’t care to mess with. I put Ubuntu on it and borrowed a decent laptop from work for gaming.
I will, however, probably built/buy a new machine next year, somewhere around the time that Old Republic comes out. That timing will be complete coincidence, of course.
Most of mine is two years old, I think… I don’t ever really upgrade it all at once, but in increments. Right now, I have an Athlon X4 CPU sitting on the shelf waiting for a good sale on a decent motherboard to install.
At the moment, though, the current configuration is still good enough for most of my PC gaming needs.
It really needs a new case, however. I’ve been using the same one for something like eight years now, and it’s getting a bit dented. Ventilation could be better, too.
My desktop is about a year and a half old, I think. It’s in good shape – wasn’t top of the line when I bought it, but I don’t play too much on it that’s demanding. Elemental horfs a bit at max settings and resolution, though.
I’ve finally kicked my silent PC obsession after 6 years and this year’s i7 930 will be my last.
Mine will be three years old this August. Haven’t felt a real need to upgrade, but I am pretty happy with running lowering resolution and settings to get more frame rate. Once my games start to look like crap and chug I’ll upgrade but I suspect that’ll be another 2-5 years+. I have a 2.4ghz Q6600 not OC’d (but I might do so if I feel the need), 4GB ram, 2.5TB HDD, GF8800GTS, and Win7 64bit.
There’s hardly a reason to upgrade anymore. I did reinstall the OS with Windows 7 though. Quad X3360 and 4900 ATI. No reason at all, aside from the occasional, fleeting SSD desire. Going all SSD will probably be the only significant upgrades i perform on any of my systems for a long while.
Exact same system here. It plays anything I throw at it on medium to high detail setting depending on the game. Not upgrading for the foreseeable future.
Yup, my desktop is just over three years old, and other than a switch out a fried 8800GTX with a 5770, I haven’t touched anything. It plays pretty much everything on medium or high, and with a fresh Windows 7 installation isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. I’d love to get a new computer just to geek out over it, but I can’t see myself doing anything other than an SSD, or maybe 4 more gigs of RAM if it comes down in price far enough. Still kicking myself for not getting the full 8 gigs at the time, when it was like $30 after rebate for 4GB.
Wow, at the moment 81 people have replied and only 13 people – total – plan to rebuild their systems in the next year. That’s only 16%! Doesn’t bode too well for the PC hardware business when even among grognardy PC-heavy Qt3 members, only one in six of us plan to rebuild our systems anytime soon. Quite astonishing, really!
The only upgrade I could see making to my system would be possibly adding more RAM. Anything else would require a full-blown CPU/motherboard change, and I just don’t see the payoff for that much investment vs. negligible performance increase.
I put my current system together in 2003. Picking good components and keeping the OS lightweight can keep a gaming rig viable for a long, long time. That being said, I’m planning a replacement build within a month or so. Should be fun since almost every slot/plug/pin standard has changed since the last time I did this.
Impressive. How well can you run games without PCI-E?
My PC is about two weeks old and it’s goddamn awesome. I hadn’t had a really good machine in over four years so I’m living it up now. Everything goes to 11!
It’s currently sporting an X1950 Pro, which does fine with AAA games up until 2008 or so. Beyond that… well… thank god for the backlog.
My last built-from-scratch game PC I put together about 2 years ago: Core 2 Duo w/4 gigs of RAM & HD 4870 CF. Since then I’ve upgraded the CPU to a C2Q and added an SSD for a boot drive. Plays pretty much everything I throw at it. Would like to add more RAM too, but hoping DDR2 prices come down a bit first. [Probably wishful thinking: should’ve bought more when it was ~$50 for 4 gigs.]
My technolust sez it’s due for another upgrade (I used to upgrade every couple of years), but the “problem” with that is I would have to spring for a pretty high-end rig to get something substantially faster - e.g., Core i7, HD 5970 or GTX 480, 6 or 8 gigs of RAM, etc. - and right now I’m not willing to blow that kinda money. Plus until I upgrade my gaming monitor (1920x1080 - it’s actually a 32" LCD TV), I don’t really need a faster GPU. And as the OP noted, the consolification factor means there aren’t that many bleeding-edge PC games anymore. Heck, even Crysis is getting “watered down” for its console debut.
So, the spirit is willing to upgrade, but the wallet is weak.
I think the game that made me really unhappy in terms of performance was Dawn of Discovery (I had a x1950 Pro with 1gb of RAM and a 3800x AMD CPU). That game just did not want to run well at all. Tropico 3 was the same to a lesser extent. RAM and CPU were probably severe bottlenecks in my case, though.
07-18-2006, 05:39 PM was when i posted about my new tablet pc. maybe next year i’ll get a new desktop so i learn how to use a new windows os.