So I decided that instead of spending the money to buy myself the laptop (see previous posts), I’d dump it into a computer upgrade for myself. Its been a long time in the waiting, and I figured I’d do it right.The other thing to keep in mind is that whenever one machine in the house gets upgraded, invariably, so do all the others, in a sort of hand-me-down fashion. In addition, I’ve decided to finally make the switch to LCD monitors. Speeds have been improving steadily, while prices have dropped considerably. After some research, here’s the order list:

Ok, so what does all that boil down to. New mb, proc and cpu. Once again I’m going with AMD. Motherboard support PCIex slots, as well as having 2 ready for graphics cards (SLI capable). I did decide to get two video cards. Someday later if I decide to, I can hook them together to drive a single monitor. In this case, though, each will drive one LCD in a dual head configuration. Can’t wait to try that out. Its also going to be my first venture into SATA territory. Motherboard supports RAID, so I’m going to have the two 300GB drives mirrored at the BIOS level. Should be a really solid step up in performance on all fronts, and having the added reliability of the mirroring means I don’t have to be quite so anal about backups.

The wireless access point is one of the other main upgrades we were intending to do recently, and now’s a good a time as any to get the gear. The monitor I did a bit of research on, and it looks to be one of the best currently available in the gamer space. <12ms response time, good reviews all around, and Tom’s thinks its the bee’s knees.. I can’t wait to get these bad boys in here and hooked up. Phew. Hopefully, the gods of “In Stock” and “Shipping” are appeased this week and will deliver to me in short order.

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