So I splurged and gave my PC a major upgrade.

[Mozgus]

Yeah, it's a contradiction to a thread I was in a few weeks ago on the discussion of gaming PC entry price-points, but there were quite a few reasons for overhauling my machine for $800:

1) My local MicroCenter is mere blocks from my house, and a lot of current-gen PC hardware sells much cheaper there than at Newegg, and obviously, there's no shipping charges buying locally. For example, the CPU I bought is $300 at newegg, but $230 at MicroCenter. Good savings.

2) While my previous PC could still run most any optimized game on medium-high settings on Windows XP, every time I put Vista or 7 on that thing, game performance plummeted. This would be fine if XP was worth sticking with, but the fact is, as individual software evolved, I began having more and more issues in XP, including explorer.exe crashing about a dozen times a day, due to some unidentified app permanently breaking it. I spend dozens of hours searching for answers, but found jack shit. Day by day, XP was becoming more problematic, no matter how many times I formatted it.

3) Vista does actually work well when you put it on hardware that was designed for it. My cheapo laptop is evidence of this. While it's meager specs couldn't run much, it never had trouble with Vista, whereas my much more powerful PC couldn't go for 3 minutes without something catastrophic happening in Vista.

4) I just wanted to future proof my PC, while I had the spare time (no job right now), and money saved. Also, I feel like I've gotten to the point where I own most anything else I want.

So the hardware I replaced was as follows:

Antec TruePower 2.0 550W --> Corsair TX750W
Athlon Dualcore 4200+ --> Intel Core i7 920
2GB of OCZ Platinum DDR400 --> 6GB of Corsair XMS3 DDR3 in triple channel
Asus A8N5X --> EVGA X58 3X SLI

Remaining specs are near the bottom of this page, with a pic.

Eventually I will get a new case, Antec 1200, and a new main hard drive, 10k rpm VelociRaptor, so I can rebuild my old PC and sell it.

So how does it run? So far, no complaints. I can max out any game I wish, like L4D, TF2, DMC4, UT3, despite Vista doing it's best to bog me down. Like I said, mostly, it's just a future proof system. Not a lot of software uses the full 4 cores/8 threads, besides divx. The only thing holding me back at all are my old sata drives. My 8800gt still takes care of itself, and I don't see myself going for a new video card this year, if even next year.

Any problems? Not many. The main issue was how the new onboard realtek hdaudio chip refuses to detect when a headset is plugged into my front jacks. Fortunately they include a switch that removes the detection, and just opens the lines to the front jacks all the time.

Any gripes? Really just one. The motherboard takes a while to boot, as it runs a series a tasks before even displaying the first screen, every time you boot up. I can live with that. Also, if you use the one IDE port, or the SATA ports 5-9 or whatever, you must enable an extra drive controller, which makes you wait through an extra boot screen. Again, it's not so bad. I should probably replace my old IDE burner with a $25 sata one sometime soon.

Oh and I just noticed MicroCenter added $60 in rebates starting today to the PSU and Mobo. Fuck me. Wish I waited 2 more days.

[petey]

Buy a soundcard and you'll increase your fps by a noticeable amount. Although I suppose your motherboard may be better than mine.

[MrPopo]

3) Vista does actually work well when you put it on hardware that was designed for it. My cheapo laptop is evidence of this. While it's meager specs couldn't run much, it never had trouble with Vista, whereas my much more powerful PC couldn't go for 3 minutes without something catastrophic happening in Vista.

THANK YOU.

I can't tell you how many times I have to explain to people that Vista isn't horrible, it's just Vista on legacy hardware that's horrible.

[superlarz]

3) Vista does actually work well when you put it on hardware that was designed for it. My cheapo laptop is evidence of this. While it's meager specs couldn't run much, it never had trouble with Vista, whereas my much more powerful PC couldn't go for 3 minutes without something catastrophic happening in Vista.

THANK YOU.

I can't tell you how many times I have to explain to people that Vista isn't horrible, it's just Vista on legacy hardware that's horrible.

I like Vista too. And i dont beat the min requirements by that much. Everything pretty much runs as fast as I could imagine, and I hardly ever have any software issues. The only things I ever have crash on me are betas and other things of that nature. Vista is a resource hog though. I cant wait to see what Windows 7 is like... would be nice to have an OS that doesnt take up so much of the resources.

[Hatta]

Man I hate to threadjack... but I will. All else equal, a new operating system should be faster than an old operating system. If they're not adding new features, then they should be optimizing what is already there. With that in mind, if a new operating system is slower than the old one you ought to be getting some new features. So the question is, what features does Vista add to use all those cycles? Aero is just eye candy. UAC is just annoying. DX11? No reason they couldn't have released that for XP.

No, Vista is just another step on the Microsoft upgrade treadmill. The only reason to use it is because newer software supports Vista because it's newer, not because it's better. If there was no Vista, people would still be writing software for XP, with no loss in functionality. So the move to Vista is a net loss for PC users.

[Mozgus]

Buy a soundcard and you'll increase your fps by a noticeable amount. Although I suppose your motherboard may be better than mine.

This was true 7 years ago. It's no longer true if all you have is a stereo setup like me, and you aren't playing the select few games that offer EAX4.0 or whatever proprietary sound architectures there are. Most good motherboards these days come with fantastic sound chips that don't produce any negative performance.

THANK YOU.

I can't tell you how many times I have to explain to people that Vista isn't horrible, it's just Vista on legacy hardware that's horrible.

I like Vista too. And i dont beat the min requirements by that much. Everything pretty much runs as fast as I could imagine, and I hardly ever have any software issues. The only things I ever have crash on me are betas and other things of that nature. Vista is a resource hog though. I cant wait to see what Windows 7 is like... would be nice to have an OS that doesnt take up so much of the resources.

Well Microsoft should be blamed for always advertising their OSs as if they are viable upgrades for older PCs. They just aren't. Windows 7 is better than Vista. That's a fact. I will most definitely be jumping to it when it goes final. I may even buy it, as long as MS doesn't do something completely stupid to it, or it's marketing.

Man I hate to threadjack... but I will. All else equal, a new operating system should be faster than an old operating system. If they're not adding new features, then they should be optimizing what is already there. With that in mind, if a new operating system is slower than the old one you ought to be getting some new features. So the question is, what features does Vista add to use all those cycles? Aero is just eye candy. UAC is just annoying. DX11? No reason they couldn't have released that for XP.

No, Vista is just another step on the Microsoft upgrade treadmill. The only reason to use it is because newer software supports Vista because it's newer, not because it's better. If there was no Vista, people would still be writing software for XP, with no loss in functionality. So the move to Vista is a net loss for PC users.

All true, except you mean DX10, and not 11. 11 is coming to Vista as well. I believe 11 is already part of 7.

But really, what can you do about it? That's how the market is. We must be kept under the guise of product evolution, even if it's not always evolving for the better. At least Windows 7 is less bloated and runs faster than Vista. It could very well turn out to be the upgrade you speak of.

[Niode]

Also, contrary to popular belief, you can actually disable UAC. It takes less than 60 seconds and just needs a reboot.

CP->User accounts->your user account->Disable UAC

Reboot

When it nags you about disabling UAC just tell it to not notify you of these kinds of issues.

[Mozgus]

Also, contrary to popular belief, you can actually disable UAC. It takes less than 60 seconds and just needs a reboot.

CP->User accounts->your user account->Disable UAC

Reboot

When it nags you about disabling UAC just tell it to not notify you of these kinds of issues.

Is this considered a secret or something? I thought everyone that hates UAC knows about this.

[Niode]

No, but so many people have the UAC argument as a reason to hate Vista. I get one almost daily at work. I tell them that they can disable it really easy. MS even explain how to on their website. They're usually shocked, or make up some other bullshit excuse on why Vista sucks.

I prefer OS X over Windows any day, but as far as Windows OS goes, Vista does have it's upsides, especially on a nice big screen with some decent hardware.

[Mozgus]

No, but so many people have the UAC argument as a reason to hate Vista. I get one almost daily at work. I tell them that they can disable it really easy. MS even explain how to on their website. They're usually shocked, or make up some other bullshit excuse on why Vista sucks.

I prefer OS X over Windows any day, but as far as Windows OS goes, Vista does have it's upsides, especially on a nice big screen with some decent hardware.

Well there's a lot of reasons why Vista sucks, but they don't include anything that you can fix within seconds. Need I count how many things I have to switch or disable in XP freshly after installing?