- It appears that "solid state harddrives" are now reaching useful sizes 
and sane pricing levels. (E.g., when I first looked at this it was 



- nVidia's latest and greatest is the GeForce 200 series. The 260 is 
expensive, but not extortionate. The 280 is several times the price. 
However, every benchmark I've seen shows the 280 as about 20% at best. 
Given that it's far more than 20% more expensive, that doesn't seem like 
great value for money. I'm considering buying a 260. (My GeForce 7900GT 
is slowly dying...)

- It seems that AMD's CPU designs still trail Intel by a wide margin in 
terms of performance. I think AMD might give you more performance for 
your money, but if you want the fastest CPU it's not going to be an AMD 
product. And Intel's offerings mostly seem to be a reasonable price. 
(Obviously anything that says "Extreme" on it is 400% more expensive but 
only about 6% faster.)

- For ages every Intel CPU going has used the same socket. It seems 
there's a new one just come out, and currently motherboards for it are 
absurdly expensive. (Like, the motherboard costs more than the CPU!) I 
think I might wait for the prices to return to sanity - as inevitably 
they will - and then make a purchase. (Curiosly, the CPUs themselves 
aren't *that* expensive, considering they're brand new.)

- I've been looking at watercooling. Just to find out how expensive it 


waterblocks seem to be the expensive part - especially for GPUs.)



even more amazing is that you can spend *hundreds* of pounds on 
31337-gamer PSUs if you wish.


hundred pounds if you want something ridiculously over-styled. Of 
course, all the expensive cases are aluminium rather than steel. (I was 
recently very surprised to learn that hyper-expensive aluminium is 
actually *less* thermally conductive than plain ordinary copper. So... 
why don't they just make cases out of copper??)

Every time I turn out to a clan meeting, everybody brings along their 
uber-gaming rig. You know the kind of thing - insanely over-styled 
casing with big transparent windows, fans that light up, internal case 
lighting, elaborate watercooling systems with polished chrome fans, 
multiple graphics cards the size of a car, high-capacity HDs in 
front-loading hot-swap drive bays, etc etc. And then there's my PC... 
which is just a PC.

I could almost go for the insane look... :-P

Post a reply to this message