I finally decided to retire my trusty old Pentium4. It has served me well
for almost too long, but it was time to let it go. (I was having difficulty
running most modern games, even with a severely upgraded display card.)

The new PC is an Intel Core i5 (four cores at 3.3 GHz) with 16GB of RAM.

When running a computation-heavy program, even one single core seems to
be a bit over 3 times as fast as my old P4. Povray's benchmark gives these
results:

Render Time:
  Photon Time:      0 hours  0 minutes  1 seconds (1.851 seconds)
              using 7 thread(s) with 2.133 CPU-seconds total
  Radiosity Time:   No radiosity
  Trace Time:       0 hours  3 minutes 34 seconds (214.869 seconds)
              using 4 thread(s) with 848.523 CPU-seconds total

which I suppose are ok.

(Unfortunately, I don't remember what the result was with the P4, but I think
it was over 15 minutes.)

To top it all, I also decided to put my old trustworthy 19-inch CRT to rest
and bought a new 23-inch widescreen LCD monitor (full HD resolution, of
course). The larger screen area and the widescreen aspect ratio really makes
a huge difference when gaming.

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