A New Case For Some Old Hardware

Enermax Sea Hawk
Originally uploaded by discordinoffice.

I'll try not to make a habit of writing about things I've just purchased, but this is cool and I thought I'd show it off.

I just bought this case last night because my giant blue case has broken, the front gate has broken off and no longer stays in place. The new case lacks a gate, so I guess there won't be any problems with my knees bashing it into disrepair...

This new case comes with a fan control knob and temperature display, as well as front accessable USB ports and FireWire ports - which as anybody with iPods or printers know, are quite handy. It was cheap - probably because it didn't come with a power supply - but it is going to be pretty cool when it finally arrives.

I thought about purchasing some other things, since my computer is somewhat outdated, but new technology is still far too expensive. Video cards that would significantly make a difference to quality from my current GeForce FX 5600 are in the $200 range. Motherboard and CPU bundles of the AMD 64 socket 939 persuassion are still on average above $300. They rarely include motherboards which are good quality, and many lack some of the new cutting edge interfaces and features - like PCI Express and Gigabit Lan.

Once the new 512 mb cards are relased by Nvidia and ATI a price drop in video cards is sure to occur, and the way AMD and Intel are putting out processors I can only imagine more significant drops to come. Maybe this summer I'll be able to update the hardware again, because my P4 2.8 ghz machine is garbage for gaming and is highly unstable. While this is probably more of a device driver problem, I like blaming it on my motherboard and Intel, since my AMD XP 2600 never gave me any problems. If I updated, I could then have three running machines, which may sound insane, but it's a definite plus because they would each serve a purpose.

The P4 Prescott is my current desktop computer, and while it operates fine for the most part it has been known to cause random, unexplainable, errors. The AMD XP 2600 is functioning as a file server to the computers and Xbox on my LAN, it is also running an FTP server. I have recently started doing some video editing, which requires a powerful CPU and a lot of RAM. That seems to be the only thing my P4 is good at. If I updated my system, I could have a cutting edge gaming machine, a relatively cutting edge video editing and multimedia machine, and the old file server - which doesn't require any serious power for my general purposes.

Now if only those prices would drop . . .