Bones' Blog of Stuff About Things

A couple of weeks back, while playing WoW on my desktop, I was treated to about 30 seconds of the virtual world crumbling into graphical oblivion. Parts of it stretched themselves toward an unseen origin while other parts changed colour like confused polygonal squid. Then the machine locked up. After a few attempted reboots that got to Windows and not much further, the PC refused to show anything, not even the BIOS loading screen. Replacing the video card got me nowhere, and the same went for the memory. Now, the power button on the front does nothing, with the PSU switch immediately powering up all the drives and I get no error beeps or anything else even with no RAM or graphics card plugged in. That’ll be one dead motherboard then.

I looked on EBay for a 2nd hand replacement and there were a few, but they all went for prices I wasn’t willing to pay and so I started to look at a full system upgrade — something that I had intended to put off for at least another six months. And so began several days of deliberation. I won’t go into detail about all the choices I discarded, the short story is that my new system will be based around a Gigabyte 965P-DS3P motherboard, an E6300 Core Duo which I’ll be slapping a Tuniq 120 on and overclocking for value, and a Gainward 8800GTS 640MB for the graphical oomph. 2GB of PC6400 RAM, a Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB hard-drive and a Corsair HX620W PSU round out the bulk of the kit. All in all, rather than spend 50 quid on a replacement motherboard to get my perfectly adequate PC back up and running, I’m spending 900 quid on a system upgrade. Somewhere in that stark statement of idiocy is some logic, but I doubt I could explain it.

Anyway, the post isn’t about what I bought, it’s about the real decision when it comes to upgrades — Do I upgrade now, or wait for the next new toy? You see there are some periods where it is just a bad idea to buy stuff, like buying an Apple just before they switched to Intel or buying any laptop just before Centrino launched. When you’re buying components for a self-build, these potential technology pitfalls multiply and you can end up completely paralysed, which can be just as bad as buying the wrong thing. So, what are the tipping point technology decisions?

CPU/Socket

For me, this is the major one. This choice ties the bulk of your money into a specific CPU family and set of motherboards. Once you’ve chosen, you can’t switch one out of that family without the other. When I last upgraded, I went for the AMD socket 754 platform. However, I did so knowing that there was a very limited upgrade path for me. Socket 754 had already been roadmapped for phasing out within a year of that purchase. At the time, it didn’t bother me because there wasn’t another choice out there with a significantly longer lifespan, certainly not socket939, which would have cost me significantly more to buy then and offers me even less value for money now (the AMD X2 939s are insanely expensive compared to the Core Duo chips because AMD has switched to the AM2 socket).

Right now is great time to be making this decision. In terms of CPU, the Core Duo chips are out on their own in the same way that the Athlon 64 chips had no real rivals for performance value when I bought them. I don’t have a crystal ball, but AMD don’t seem to be about to turn the tables again any time soon. So, with the CPU choice made, the socket choice is made too, as there is only socket 775 for Core Duo. In reality, the only choice here is whether there is something new around the corner from Intel, i.e. if you can get another worthwhile upgrade or two from Socket 775. Well, there is talk of a new socket for octo-core processors arriving mid-2008, but the signs are that socket 775 will be the mainstream socket for Intel CPUs for at least 18 months from now. That’s about as good as it gets in terms of future-proofing in his game. Socket 775 should allow at least one significant CPU upgrade and/or allow an upgrade of the motherboard under the CPU if necessary. Job done.

Video

R600… R600… R600… Tech forums everywhere are host to these lost souls who whisper its name wherever possible card purchases are mentioned. Now, to be fair, 3D video cards are one place where it’s easy to make bad choices and we’re in an odd place due to DX10 and Vista, which I’ll talk about later. The situation as stands is that the nVidia 8800 series is the standout product at the moment, not because it is the only DX10 GPU, but because it outperforms everything else in today’s games, which are not DX10. Even if the R600 is enormously faster than the 8800 series, you can be sure that it will be priced to match and most likely impossible to buy anyway. Frankly, the only reason I could see for waiting is if you are a dedicated benchmarker and just have to be a contender for the top 3DMark score. Most people will point a prospective buyer towards the 8800GTS cards, and I think they’re right.

Storage

Outside of the small group who seriously care about Blu-Ray or HD-DVD today, there’s nothing to be concerned about in the optical drive space. Dual-layer DVD rewriters are preposterously cheap and all you’ll need.

Hard-drives on the other hand have at least one upcoming technology that might give you pause, the introduction of flash-memory on the drives — what they are calling hybrid drives. There is good news, though. This only affects laptops for Vista and only really offers power-consumption benefits, so desktop purchasers need not hold off on the credit card.

Memory

When I last upgraded, DDR2 turned up and made me unhappy about my DDR1 memory. Next month, the new Intel motherboard chipset P35 “Bearlake” is expected to start entering the retail channels. It supports DDR3. Oh no! Surely this is no time to be upgrading at all! Well, my unhappiness over DDR2 was pretty unfounded and so would any unhappiness over DDR3. In practical terms you won’t see a huge impact in normal usage and the memory will be at a premium cost for a while yet. I say don’t sweat it. Let the performance nuts launch themselves up the vicious part of the price/performance slope to achieve the ultimate and settle for just great performance instead. If the worst comes to fruition and P35 turns out to be irresistibly awesome (and that would be a first for a motherboard chipset in my experience), remember that it’s still the same socket, so you can potentially sell your motherboard and memory and take your CPU to the new chipset.

Display

Unless you’re in a business where colour fidelity is important or you take playing first-person shooters very seriously and can’t live with even a possibility of frame lag, any display upgrade will be to a big, juicy LCD and probably a widescreen. In this instance I’d just say “don’t”. Well, not quite “don’t”, more like “don’t buy anything expensive”. The reason is that there is an upcoming change in this sector that may make today’s displays look very old hat. That change is the introduction of 120Hz panels. Right now, nearly all LCDs operate at 60Hz, this is fine, but there are issues with movement. For a long time the battle against blurred movement was waged in terms of pixel response time, but that angle of attack seems to be running out of steam. More recently, we’ve seen technologies such as black frame insertion brought to bear, with some success. Whether 120Hz is a killer technology for this problem, I really don’t know, but I’m not willing to buy a fancy 24+inch widescreen monitor and bet 500 pounds or more that it (or one of the BFI technologies for that matter) won’t prove to be indispensable. For now, I’ve gone with a cheap 22inch 1680×1050 widescreen, and I’d recommend that others do the same.

OS

I’ve been putting this off, but in reality this is a major factor in today’s market in a way that the OS choice hasn’t been for a long time. To Vista or not to Vista? I’ll own up and say that I have bought Vista Home Premium, but I’ll also say that I suspect that I’ll be dual-booting XP for a fair while yet. My experience with the release candidates for Vista was that a lot of older games didn’t like it and I still want to play those games. The same situation occurred when I moved to Windows 2000 and had to keep a copy of ’98 around, so it’s no great hardship, but something to bear in mind.

Anyway, the reason Vista is a big deal in this decision-making business is that whole view of the upgrade as something that will last you X years. No-one needs Vista now, but at some point it will make more sense to make the jump than stay with XP. I’m betting that the tipping point will be soon. Soon enough that I may as well buy it now and install it as a second OS so I can judge when I’m ready. My bet is based on DX10, the media centre functions and the forthcoming relationship between XBox and Games for Windows. Something amongst this huddle of frivolous features is going to birth an application that I want, maybe it will be a DX10 game, maybe a cool way of accessing media or maybe just the opportunity to beat up on XBox users doing the “I’m using a joypad” Dalek movement thing in an FPS.

That we’re in a nasty place between OSes doesn’t stop you upgrading, of course, but it does mean that you will have to make a choice. Jump now and suffer some compatibility and driver pain, or stick with XP and suffer whatever levels of angst you feel from not being in the “latest stuff” gang. My advice would be to stick with XP if you already have it, and only buy Vista if you are buying Windows anyway. Note that I didn’t follow that advice myself though, even though I stated that I wasn’t intending to move to Vista until the end of the year a matter of weeks ago. I guess I like new stuff too much and the general upgrade spirit moved me.

---

So that’s my run-down of the choices. All in all, I’m actually pleased at the timing of this upgrade even though it was thrust upon me. There seem to be good, high-value choices in all component areas and very little on the horizon to give me buyer’s remorse. Feel free to tell me if I talked out of my hat anywhere, especially if some technological cataclysm is about to strike that I don’t know about.