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Now, to business! With the release of Guild Wars 2 this week, and World of Warcraft’s Mists of Pandaria expansion next month, I’m feeling the urge to upgrade my gaming PC a little. Nothing major since my Hackintosh project is far more pressing at the moment and alas my budget won’t stretch to building a completely new gaming PC – much as I’d love to! Currently, my gaming rig is as follows:
Antec 1200 Case
MSI P7N SLI Platinum motherboard
2.4GHz Intel Quad Core Q6600
4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR2 RAM
500GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
2x 512MB GDDR3 9600GT Nvidia SLI
Windows 7 64bit
Firstly I may start tinkering with the overclock on my CPU again to try and get my 3.0GHz back again. Everything was just that little bit more smooth when sporting 4 x 3.0GHz. I originally was running at 3.0GHz, but when I upgraded my RAM from 2GB to 4GB in Feb this year, I suffered a lot of stability issues. I’d upgraded to 4GB RAM, but since my motherboard’s older now, still DDR2, alas RAM is very expensive so I doubt I’ll be upping this to 8GB anytime soon! It cost £49 just to pick up the cheapest DDR2 2x2GB kit I could find, a price to cringe at considering the same 4GB kit as DDR3 only costs £30 and 8GB barely £35-45. So until my next proper gaming build, the motherboard (an MSI P7N SLI Platinum), CPU and RAM will remain as they are.
I do however still have the 64GB Crucial SSD drive left over from my server build back in May. I only used the SSD for a few weeks & found its speed was going to waste so replaced it with a 500GB Seagate Barracuda HDD for the main OS drive. This frees it up for use with my gaming rig, so I’m thinking of installing my OS onto the SSD & making the current 500GB Seagate in there my data drive for games and programs.
The only other contender for upgrade are my poor little Nvidia 9600GT graphics cards. They’re both 512MB DDR3 running in SLI. I can run games on ultra for the most part, but framerate on some more recent games, even sometimes Warcraft’s Cataclysm hits a max of 30fps where once upon a time, I used to enjoy a steady 60fps. This is making me seriously look at a new graphics card as part of my upgrade, after all it’d be the only component I’d have to buy since I already have the SSD and I could use one of the 9600GTs in my Hackintosh since they’re compatible and I won’t need an uber powerful graphics card in my hack. It’ll also fit my Bitfenix Prodigy case! 🙂 I’ll be doing some research this week as not sure which card to splash out on yet.
Stay tuned!