[PC hardware geek post alert!]
The short version: I have an old system. I want to upgrade. But the mobo I want to upgrade to doesn’t ship until Q2 2004. So I am contemplating waiting to play many of this fall’s games until next year. Yes, this means waiting to play Half-Life 2 until six months or so after it ships, just so I can play it on a cutting edge system. Am I nuts? Or are there others like me?
The long version:
So it’s been a few years since I did a major PC upgrade. Right now running an Abit BH6 mobo (remember those?) with a Powerleap 1.2Ghz Celeron upgrade, 384M 100Mhz SDRAM, and a couple plain ol’ IDE disks. In other words, minimum spec for Doom III (and probably close to realistic minimum for Half-Life 2).
I’m planning an upgrade. But as always when upgrading, the Really Cool Stuff is just around the corner. In particular, next year there will be chipsets with PCI Express graphics buses (i.e. the equivalent of AGP 16X or more) from both Intel and NVidia. Since you can upgrade the CPU or memory in your motherboard, but getting a new motherboard generally involves a new CPU and new memory also, I try to make my mobos last a few years. So buying one this fall seems dumb since AGP 8x is on the way out; a PCI Express mobo will be upgrade-worthy for at least a few years to come.
Fine. So my next system is next spring. But in the meanwhile there are all these games – Doom III, Half-Life 2 — that are gonna beat my current system like it’s never been beaten before. So the temptation is to just ignore the new hot games and wait for the ubersystem, and THEN play the hell out of them.
In other words, my new-hardware-lust and my new-game-lust are at war with each other!
Anyone else ever had this dilemma?
The rest of you can stop yawning now and move on to another thread… oh, you already have ;)