Death and Taxes (and upgrades) (Eighty1 (Thallium)) by eighty1

I’ve had my current gaming rig for over two years now and it has served me very well in that time. Just about every game I’ve thrown at it has run quite well and the original pair of 7800GTs did their job admirably. I recently upgraded to a single 8800GT and that gave the old girl quite a bit of an extension, but the AMD 4400+ processor and DDR-3200 RAM subsystem are really starting to show their age. So I’ve decided that if I get a decent tax refund, a good chunk of that will go towards building a new beast. The best part about it is I only need a motherboard, processor and RAM; I’m going to keep the 8800GT, case, PSU and Raptor 150 (ditching my old 36GB Raptor during the upgrade) so the entire upgrade won’t technically cost too much. I am willing to spend up to $1000 though, but unless I get something like a Core 2 Extreme, I don’t foresee the price being that high. If the damned thing is even available, I’ll get the E8500; however, by the time I decide to upgrade the Q8500 might be around (and that would be just damned awesome: a 45nm quad-core successor to the Q6600!). I don’t think I’ll go to DDR3, mostly for price and latency concerns.

Speaking of taxes… I’m going to see Geri today. Mitch got a decent refund and I hope I get something back; I’m a little bit fetishistic about taxes. There’s something akin to gambling when you start running the numbers to see if you win (yay refund) or lose (boo payments). Of course, the spectre of an audit is always lurking but I don’t do anything illegal. Hopefully I get a decent sum back so I can at least buy some more pants and shirts. My favorite jeans have a hole in the left knee that just keeps getting bigger. If I’m not careful, I will inadvertantly end-up with Daisy Dukes, and that would be frightening.

Posted in: intel , money , news & such , oh god my eyes , ram , taxes , tech , upgrade