System Upgrade

Posted on Monday, January 26, 2009 by TheBlackzone

I have a bunch of PC systems around here but for the past two years or so I worked almost exclusively on my Dell notebook. I haven’t upgraded any of my desktop systems since. In fact, the last time I upgraded any of them must have been four years or even longer ago. But now, with the dawn of new, power-demanding video games like COD5 and others, I had to make a decision: Buy a new, powerful notebook or upgrade a desktop PC. I decided to do the latter…

I picked the system that once was my main machine and started looking for a combination of suitable components. I needed to find a balance between power, costs, energy consumption and noise emission. Especially noise emission is critical. I really hate it when PCs sound like vacuum cleaners. All in all this task isn’t as simple as it sounds.

Long story short, I ended up with the following components:

• ASUS P5Q Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU
• Arctic Cooling Freezer CPU Cooler
• Corsair XMS2-6400 DDR RAM 4GB
• be quiet! Dark Power Pro P7 power supply
• Gainward 512MB 9800GTX+ PCIe graphics card

So far I’m pretty satisfied with my choice. The system runs stable and is very quiet. It has enough power to run all current games at highest details with excellent frame rates. The costs were approximately 500 EUR, which I would say is quite reasonable. I should note that I used my existing FDD/HDD/DVD drives, so there was no need for new ones.

Now, time to play some COD5 :-)

Tags: misc