Are things finally slowing down in PC land?

bfar · 24 Feb 2006 at 15:04

My rig is over 1 and 1/2 years old. A64 3400, 6800 Ultra, 2Gig Ram. I recently upgraded to 2gb Ram. It still survives any game I throw at it on high to max details. Still feels like i have a high end machine. I see no need to upgrade for games for maybe up to another year, when Vista, dx10 and other technologies have settled down. This is the longest I've ever got out of a setup without throwing $$ at it every few months.

Too good to be true? Are things finally slowing down, or am I just lucky? :cool:

paradigm · 24 Feb 2006 at 15:09

I think its a mentality thing. I used to buy new components every month or so (or whenever something came out), back in the days of the Athlon T-bird, and the Athlon-XP.

I think I must have grown up somewhat, as now I only upgrade every 18-24 months or so, its not that I couldn't tell my rig was getting old, I just downed the settings a little (definately not a lot) if something played a little jerky.

Just upgraded from:

Abit IC7-MAX3
P4 3.2GHz
Geforce 6800GT
1GB Corsair PRO XMS3200LLPT

to:

Abit AN8
A64 X2 3800+
Geforce 7800GT 512MB
(same RAM for now)

Raikiri · 24 Feb 2006 at 15:18

Gone through 3 computers in 2 years

Although the end product is a fair bit faster than what I started with and I should be happy with this for about a year until I buy 2gb of ram (maybe sooner) and a Dual core CPU.

semi-pro waster · 24 Feb 2006 at 15:20

The rate of technology isn't slowing down much(if at all) as far as I can tell however a good system built now is much more capable and less likely to be taxed than in days past. For instance you can still do pretty much any office task comfortably on any machine from 1ghz upwards so it is mainly games that tax a system right now and even they can be easily scaled. This I think is why your PC appears to be lasting you longer.

Dinomania · 24 Feb 2006 at 15:28

I don't think PCs are slowing down but application and game-writers aren't piling on the bloat lately as fast as they have been in the past.

A few years ago it wouldn't take long before I'd moved up a few application-generations and realised that the new ones were taking too long to load. Now I've had this incarnation of my PC since about summer 2003 (blimey! Didn't realise it was that long), and I haven't noticed any programs (well apart from Acro-Read, for what it is - grr) taking too long to load.

Like, I got my first PC in 1998 with Win95 - within 2 years I'd experienced 4 different OS's (Win 95, 98, ME & 2k) and by 2000 it was really really struggling with the things I was trying to run on it.

Spleenus · 24 Feb 2006 at 16:13

Also consider that processors are advancing just as fast in the amount they can do it's just that in comparison to current speeds it isn't as bad. Ie going from 700Mhz to 1.1GHz is much more beneficial than going from 3GHz to 3.4GHz.

Gonna be a load of upgrading coming up when Vista and DX10 are released though. That's what I'm saving up for.

trojan698 · 24 Feb 2006 at 17:12

I'm sure Vista will make it feel its age

Soul Rider · 24 Feb 2006 at 17:30

I'm hoping my newly purchased 3700+ will keep my system fresh even after vista is out. Don't plan to upgrade that now for at least 2 years!!

XtAsY · 25 Feb 2006 at 08:34

I plan to upgrade when the first generation of AM2 processors come out, which will be 06/06/06

So I have a good 4 months to continue saving. I will most probably raise my budget from £1500 to £2000 or maybe a little under, will have to see. The whole idea of my new rig is to be built for the unreal engine 3 (UT2007) and for me to do 3D design work on. I'm hoping to have something like this if I can:

AMD FX 62 socket AM2
2 GB DDR2 800
GeForce 7900GTX or Radeon X1900 xt-x
SoundBlaster X-FI Fatal1ty
2 x 200GB SATAII hd in RAID 0

However, I will continue waiting until the UT2007 demo is released, which will be this year I really hopw if everything carries of progressing like it is now. I will then base my decisions on what hardware I get on the benchmarks, so I may end up with an Intel system if they perform best.. who knows

If anyone would like some good new information on the socket AM2, go to > http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/21/a_look_at_amds_socket_am2_platform/

Current rig:

P4 Northwood 3.2GHz
GeForce 6800 GT
1 GB Corsair XMS DDR400
2 x 80GB SATA in RAID 0
SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS w/ Gigaworks S750's
Surprisingly with this i can max everything out in F.E.A.R apart from having soft shadows on, and texture detail set to medium, and it runs extremely playable.