Time to Upgrade

I mentioned in my wedding blog that we recorded the wedding in AVCHD 1080/60i on our new panasonic AG-HMC150 AVCHD camcorder. The video is awesome. Unfortunately my computer is barely capable of playing it. After the first couple minutes it could not keep the frame rate up. A few minutes after that the temp alarm went off. Apparently it was not made to be decoded by a normal computer in real time.

Its not like I have a crappy computer either. Its a AMD X2 with dual NVIDIA 7900 cards, so not the latest and greatest, but decent. At least I thought so until now. To insult my sensibilities Liz and I both got a video game with a gift card from the wedding. She got the Sims II apartment life bonus pack something or other and I got GTA IV. Her game ran fine. Not so much on the GTA IV.

I bought GTA IV because the previous Grand Theft Auto's had really good PC versions. This time they have sold out to Microsoft and it shows. The game requires you to sign up with two different online accounts and log into both just to load the game. To add insult to injury they still require the stupid disk. It also failed miserably at downloading any of the updates automatically and just gave me the classic random numbered error. So after finally signing up for all of the online accounts and manually downloading and installing all the updates I loaded the game. It froze a couple times, but I did get it to load only to find out it does not support SLI in a most painful way. It basically loaded one image into one card and then only updated the other. It was an epileptics worst nightmare. So I had to turn off SLI to avoid developing a twitch. Even at a graphics level well below any other game I play it still was jerky, had tons of artifacts and froze often. So it looks like Rockstar has joined the companies trying to destroy PC gaming.

I need a new system to edit the video from the new camera anyway, so this just pushed me over the edge. Yes I realize it is just buying into the whole upgrade to support bad programming vicious circle, but so be it. So I went on tigerdirect.com and got me some new hardware. TigerDirect is one of my favorite online computer stores, good prices and more importantly great service, and no I do not get any kick backs from them.

I decided to go the Intel i7 route, since you might as well get the top of the line at the moment. Although I got the bottom one so it was not a complete rip off, the Intel Core i7-920 2.66Ghz 8M LGA1366 CPU. I ordered a XFX X58i LGA1366 motherboard, which I am a little nervous about; I usually stick to Abit or Asus. I went with OCZ Gold Tri Channel 6144MB PC10666 DDR3 1333MHz for memory. I am not sure if I am going to run 64 bit Vista on it or not, but it was cheaper to get the 6 gigs than it was to get the 3. I still remember 64-bit XP, so I will wait until Microsoft has a couple more tries. It is kind of silly that they are so incompetent when it comes to 64 bit. All of my other computers have been running 64 bit versions of Linux since AMD starting making 64 bit chips without a problem. Anyway, I already have 2 500GB hard drives that I am going to use from the existing system as a RAID 1 main drive, but I needed some RAID 0 scratch space for the video editing so I ordered two Seagate 1.5TB Serial ATA HD 7200/32MB/SATA-3G hard drives. I saved the best for last though. I went with the BFG GeForce GTX 280 OC 1GB PCIe w/Dual Link DVI for the video card. I have done the SLI twice now and it just does not pan out as well as it should. Between poor support and heat issues its just not worth it. Since I only use my Windows box for games and a few other tasks like the video editing I am still using XP, so I am taking this opportunity to also finally jump on the Vista hate wagon. I ordered an OEM copy of Home Premium SP1. I have not liked it when I have had to use it, but I will now actually try to configure it to be at least usable. If not I can always go back to XP.

All of these toys should arrive on Friday, so I will post how the upgrade goes. I also have to figure out how to distribute the old hardware to my other computers.