Gonna Be Trickier Than I Thought
Welcome to April. Don’t forget to set your clocks forward this weekend and LOSE AN HOUR OF PRECIOUS, PRECIOUS SLEEP. Uh…sorry.
Well, I can see my next upgrade is going to be a pricey one, no way around it. This puts me in a bit of a bind, because I don’t really ever have this much money at my disposal anymore, since it takes so long to earn it I pretty much have to wind up spending some of it on some emergent situation before I can put it to its intended use.
After yesterday’s spur-of-the-moment post about my next computer hardware purchase, I actually started to do some research on parts and prices. Gads—it’s worse than I thought. There’s something big I hadn’t considered: If I’m going to switch to a PCI-Express motherboard, there goes my Radeon 9800 Pro! It’s an AGP card, so it’s not gonna work on any PCI-E board. With the aforementioned time it takes me to earn spare cash, if I were to buy the board first and then a new PCI-E video card later, the board would be outdated by the time I mated the two. Same with the reverse situation (video first, board later), but probably even more pronouncedly. So if I move to PCI-E, a new video card is coming along with. No way around it.
My preliminary research also shows that PCI-E boards use a new, 24-pin interface to the power supply, which is an update of the existing 20-pin standard. They make 20-to-24 pin adapters so you can use your existing power supply, but I hear that has introduced stability problems and other weirdness for some people. I’ve had my fair share of sporadic weirdness, and I’m tired of it. So to be safe, I’d also have to look at getting a new power supply. Grrrr…I like my damn power supply! It’s a 431-watt Enermax that has never done wrong by me.
So, I started putting some parts together. I’m pretty much looking at this type of config…
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe PCI-E nForce4 motherboard ($175.00)
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 512K cache / 800 MHz FSB / socket 939 ($179.00)
Thermaltake A1838 heatsink / fan ($25.00)
1 GB Corsair TWINX-PC3200C2PRO matched memory ($194.00)
Round cable kit (IDE, Floppy, SATA) ($22.00)
Total all that up and you got basically $600. Cool, right? That was my budget.
Except that doesn’t include the new SATA hard drive and CD/DVD burner I wanted to buy. It also doesn’t include the new video card or power supply which I discovered I’m gonna need, or the new case I wanted (although I can certainly get by with “Nomad” for the forseeable future). An nVidia GeForce 6800 with 128 MB of memory (and that’s the absolute lowest-end card I will consider) runs about $250, a new 500W future-proof Enermax power supply will be about $100, and then I still wanted new SATA drives at a cost of about $225. That’s an additional $575 I wasn’t planning on spending. Where the crap am I gonna get that kind of money? It won’t even be Christmas for another what, eight months?
I could really be an irresponsible asshole and take the $500 piece of our federal tax refund I had reserved for getting my Trans Am inspected and put it instead toward my computer. But boy, I have a feeling I’d regret that. I wonder if there’s any other way to shave some bucks off my income somewhere and funnel it into a reserve for these goodies?
When I combine the cash reserves I have now, plus the income I expect to make on my current outstanding projects, I wind up with about $850. That still puts me at $350 short, but if I sacrifice the SATA drive upgrade and try to get by with my current power supply, that should make up the difference. It just might be feasible. So now, I just have to: A) finish my side projects, and B) get paid for them. Unfortunately, the guy who’s going to owe me the most money is also ungodly slow about paying. So it could take a little longer than I hoped, but with luck I’ll be able to pull this off.
Wow…who knew this would turn into such an affair? But then when has one of my computer-buying flings not done so? 
Categorized as Computers