Note: nothing here applies to used computers/RISC workstations. In those cases, get the best you can right from the start, because upgrading will always be more expensive.
So, it’s been 7 years since my last PC (Athlon XP 1800+, Geforce 4 Ti4200-> Radeon 9500 Pro). While messing around the case, I managed to strip the wires off the power switch, and they’re pretty hard to fit back on without solder to hold them in place, so right now it’s running barebones and I can see the dust bunnies flying around inside my case.
Understandably, I’m pretty excited when my parents said they would partially finance my new build:
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition
Asus M4A89GTD Pro/USB3
4GB DDR3-1333 RAM (doesn’t matter which)
1TB hard drive (preferably Western Digital Caviar Black, because I like their hard drive diagnosis tool, Samsung’s only runs from DOS)
Seasonic S12-II Bronze 520W PSU
And that’s all. The video card (I’m thinking of a GTX 460, although it’s foolhardy to buy so soon when the Radeon 6×00 series is around the corner) will have to come separately, but that’s what the integrated graphics on the motherboard is for – to tide me over until then. The SSD will definitely have to come out of my own pocket. The 2x4GB RAM modules will also have to come out of my own pocket. So will the OCZ Revodrive PCIe SSD…
But I digress. The point of this post is to demonstrate the different strategy while building a computer this time around. This time, I’m aiming for continuous upgrades, not buying the best there is at a particular time and holding out for a couple of years. Because I did that with my Athlon XP, and look what happened, nobody bothered with DirectX 8 and went on to DirectX 9, leaving my Geforce 4 out in the cold. Since the CPU is faster than anything else I have at the moment, I don’t play games as much as I used to, and it is well known that hard drives are always the slowest component of the computer, I’ve planned out the future upgrades based on memory/SSDs. In decreasing order of speed, here are the upgrades that will make my system feel faster:
Rank 0: 4GB DDR3->12-16GB DDR3
More RAM is always good, especially when you want RAMdisks. With this, VMWare Workstation should never slow down my system when I’m compiling something in Gentoo. I’d like a 890FX board for the IOMMU support, really, but I wouldn’t dare run ESXi on my main system anyway.
Rank 1: OCZ Revodrive PCIe SSD
Sidesteps the 300MB/s SATA limit by using a PCIex4 connection. Capable of about 500MB/s sequential read/write, and thanks to its dual Sandforce controllers in RAID 0, random read/write performance is double that of OCZ’s Vertex 2. With this, I might not need a RAMdisk after all. And if I ever need to wipe the data off it for some reason, 500MB/s to my Phenom II X4 for a quick 7zip compress and then it’s streamed off to my 1TB main hard drive. Incredibly fast.
Rank 2: OCZ Vertex 2 SATA2 SSD
Cheap, and fits in one of my many many many hard drive bays. I’ll get this before the Revodrive and see how much difference it makes. Although the SB850 supports SATA 6Gb/s drives, such SSDs are still prohibitively expensive.
So now before the hard disk, I have about 2-3 choices for storage of thousands of small files (like in a Visual Studio project) that require lightning fast access. For instance, compiling a Visual Studio project in the university is limited to 50% on both cores of a Pentium D 2.8GHz, because the hard drive is limiting it (I don’t know if Visual Studio has a -pipe option). Then I’ll put a Phenom II X6 1090T and watch it scream. Or maybe AMD’s Bulldozer will really come out for Socket AM3 – which would be the best case scenario. But really, I think even a Phenom II X4 should be enough for me at this point.
With regards to GPU upgrades, the strategy of buying lots of cheap GPUs to keep pace with game requirements as opposed to buying a really expensive awesome GPU and then sitting on it for a few years also works out. A Radeon HD 5770 now, a GTX 460 later… maybe even a Radeon HD 6800 now that I’ve decided on an ATX build after all… it all makes sense, as long as you have a stable source of income.
The question now is how much of an upgrade path does your computer have before your motherboard starts to limit it all? Because the motherboard is the heart of the computer. Sure, you can replace it with another. But with that comes a new layout, new numbers of PCIe slots of differing widths, a different number of SATA ports. I’ve made a decision to splurge on the motherboard this time. It’s the most important component after all. Those lucky bastards who’ve had a new computer since the AM2 days can still run the Phenom II X6 in their boards with the appropriate BIOS update. There are rumblings to say that Bulldozer requires an AM3+ after all… oh well. I’ve waited for a few years already, why torture myself more?



