The upgrade path

I've got a nice little wish list on NewEgg, and I plan to be making some upgrades in the near future.

For starters, my 250GB hard drive is almost full. I never thought I'd fill the thing up so fast! So I've been looking into hard drives. I considered getting a high speed Raptor drive, but upon actually looking at the real-world performance numbers, I was pretty disappointed. I remember blogging about how wasteful these seemed way back when I built my first rig; but they've gotten bigger and prices have come down since then. A few reviews pretty much confirmed my early blogging: Raptors are crap. You are talking about 5 seconds or so (depending on your RAM) in loading times. Such a tiny performance gain, and yet such a huge price-per-gigabyte increase over 7200rpm drives? No. Thanks.

So the following upgrades are on the table: I'm going to get a new hard drive, probably a Western Digital 500GB drive, which are relatively inexpensive ($100 - $130). I'm going to install an OEM version of Vista 64-bit on it, and upgrade my RAM to 4GB of Patriot Performance (which will actually be cheaper than buying 2GB of my current RAM!). Funny thing... even though this will be my second OEM version of Vista (since they don't allow OEM versions to get the 64-bit disk), it's still less than if I bought the retail version. Ha!

Beyond that, I've been thinking that I want to upgrade my speaker setup. That's right, I want to jump from the Logitech z-2300 up to the nifty z-5500, Logitech's flagship 5.1 system. I may also grab that cool new G15 keyboard.

Performance wise, I'm still plenty happy. I imagine some new cards will be coming out in the next few months that are faster than my 8800GTX. But I'm getting such great performance in all my games that I really don't see any need to upgrade. The only game that challenges this card is Crysis, and that still runs great around 30 frames per second at high settings (plus Koroush Ghazi's "very high on the cheap" tweaks). The G90 is just refresh of the G80, so performance won't be drastically better. I think I will wait until nVidia releases their true next-generation (G100 or equivalent) GPU to upgrade. I'll start saving now!