Good time to buy?

[Sly Fox]

When I bought the computer I'm on right now, I got screwed over pretty hard by new technology coming out. I bought this rig with socket 754 and AGP 8X. 2 months later, PCIE 16X and socket 939 come out and I'm left in the dust. To this very day I regret not waiting that extra 2 months. So now that I'm looking to get a new PC once more, I want to be sure I don't make a similar mistake.

The PC I'm currently looking to build includes:

CPU - Intel E6600
Mobo - Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
Memory - G.SKILL 2gb DDR2 800 (5-5-5)
GPU - EVGA 8800 GTS
PSU - OCZ GameXStream 600 watt
HDD - Seagate 500 gb SATA 3.0 gb/s
Case - Lian Li PC-65B Mid-tower

The biggest concern I have, is this PC being faced with an utter lack of viable upgrades due to new PCIE standards or CPU sockets coming out soon after. As I said, this screwed me over when I got my socket 754 PC a couple years ago, so I don't want history to repeat itself.

Thank you.

[otogrim]

Thats a great set-up, go for it. Also, technology these days advance so quickly that no matter what you get, couple months down the road something better comes out. It's something you cant avoid. Just get it and be happy :)

[Sly Fox]

Well I went ahead and ordered it using Newegg's 6 month no payments / no interest dealy. Should be a nice upgrade from my socket 754 rig :p:

[squilliam]

PCI 2.0 and Intel's new socket wont come out till 2008, I believe.

[Drag]

PCI 2.0 and Intel's new socket wont come out till 2008, I believe.
You should check that i don't think its gonne take that long. there are already pci 2.0 power supply's

[Serra]

PCI 2.0 and Intel's new socket wont come out till 2008, I believe.

I thought PCI 2.0 was coming out sometime in the summer :shrug:

I wouldn't worry about that myself though, 2.0 isn't going to be what ends the life of your system.

[Drag]

I thought PCI 2.0 was coming out sometime in the summer :shrug:

I wouldn't worry about that myself though, 2.0 isn't going to be what ends the life of your system.
whats that supposed to meen? i'd say if you build a high end system right now..
qx6700
8800gtx sli
2gb

it would last 5 years

[Serra]

whats that supposed to meen? i'd say if you build a high end system right now..
qx6700
8800gtx sli
2gb

it would last 5 years

It means that he was asking if PCI-E 2.0 (the new PCI standard he was referring to) would be a limiter to the life of his system.

Also though, although that system will last for 5 years unless there's some sort of electrical failure, I'm not sure it would be anywhere near competitive within 2-3... heck, by 3 it might not even meet some application/game minimum requirements. Lets face it, between new core architectures coming out, new smaller CPU processes, improvements in video card technology (those are only from the very first series of the first generation of dx10 cards), SSD hard drives arriving, and the fact that 2GB as the standard is going to be giving way to 4GB very soon... well, that's just the way computers work.

For example, nearly 5 years ago (April 2002) the best/newest Intel processor was the socket 2.4A Northwood processor (nowhere near as sweet in OC ability as the 2.4c), boasting a 133MHz quad-pumped FSB. Wanted to make a sweet rig out of it? Assuming AnandTech's setup was fairly cutting edge (they wouldn't want anything else to bottleneck before the CPU), your system would look like:

CPU: P4 2.4GHz northwood
Mem: 256MB DDR333 Crucial (CAS2.5) DDR SDRAM
Video: NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB DDR
HDD: Maxtor D740X Ultra ATA/133 80GB HDD

Link: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.html?i=1605

Look at those specs and think to yourself before you claim that hardware will last 5 years.

Edit: Examples:
1. Half-Life 2: released november 2004, a scant 2.5 years after april 2002, and the "top-of-the-line" 2002 rig *just* scrapes the minimum requirements for RAM, the video card wouldn't have been super for it
2. Doom 3: The specs in the above rig don't even meet all the minimum requirements

... and as we all know, minimum requirements for games are not things to be "met" but rather to be exceeded.

[Drag]

that isn't true because windows xp recommends 512mb, and at that time geforce 440mx se agp was good to it was like what the 6600gt now is

[Serra]

that isn't true because windows xp recommends 512mb, and at that time geforce 440mx se agp was good to it was like what the 6600gt now is

Actually, from microsoft.com's own minimum requirements for XP Pro:



128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/upgrading/sysreqs.mspx

A Microsoft rep would probably recommend 512MB today, but that would be to account for the programs that people run *in addition to* the OS.

In addition, the 4-series may not have been bad, but it was a pre-dx9 series card. So yeah, you could perhaps have played a few games that were dual-released for dx8 and dx9, but there's a noticeable quality loss there. Further unto that, Half Life 2's minimum requirements included DX9, so although you could run the game on a DX8 card that's pretty well a full-on lose right there because it wouldn't actually take full advantage of DX9. A 6600GT was at least a DX9 native card.

Thanks for playing Drag.

[Tonucci]

Yeah...if you are not rich its better to spend periodically with moderate hardware than to spend a ton of cash on cutting edge stuff every 3 years.

[p0tter]

That setup looks good, you should be fine for a couple of years.

[Drag]

I kind off thought it wold, but thanks :D!