Ever since i saw the announcement of Unreal Tournament 3 (aka 2007) i said that i need to get a new computer for it. I was going to wait until a few weeks before the games release but fate played its hand and my computer started to die. Infact.. on the same day Shaltifs new PC arrived, mine decided to have some kind of mental break down and now doesn't want to do much stuff. I'll blog about it more some other time if i get around to fixing it.

Normally i would go and get all the computer parts separately and build it myself. But knowing that i could get it for much cheaper if i bought a pre-made system i chose that route. However even with pre-made systems, most shops will allow you to tweak things as needed which is very useful.

I bought my system from a really good shop called Falcon Computers. Its certainly not the closest shop of its kind to me, but its probably one of the best in my area making it my first choice to go to for such a buy.

So, whats inside it?

Well, as i said i got a pre-made computer and tweaked it slightly, you can see the computer specs here (i'm 99% sure thats it) and also listed below.

- Elite 330 8800GTS AMD x2 6000 Dual Core Gaming Rig
- AMD 6000 x2 Dual Core CPU
- 2GB Corsair DDR2 XMS2-6400 TwinX (2x1GB)
- Cooler Master Elite 330 Gaming Case
- 650 Watt Cooler Master PSU
- 320Gb Sata II HDD
- 16x DVDRW With Writing Software
- 320Mb Nvidia 8800GTS Gaming Card (Zotec AMP Overclocked Edition)
- Gigabyte (32 Bit Sli) Nforce 590 (GA-M59-SLI) Gaming Mainboard
- Windows Vista Home Premium OEM Version Or Windows XP MCE

As it is i think thats a really nice computer, and would recommend other people to it if they want a gaming machine. It has all of the elements to run (most?) modern games at an excellent speed, so much so the only changes i made were to the OS and hard drives.

I like a lot of harddrive space on my computers so i don't have to manage it all the time... yeah, i have a dvd burner so i can use that to put a lot of things i download over time on to disc, but i'm low on shelf space as it is with crap i should probably throw out. So the 350gb hard drive changed to 2x500gb harddrives giving me 1000gb of raw space. but around 70gb of that is lost from the file allocation tables leaving me with 930gb of internal (yes i have external drives) usable space.

The next, and final change was to the OS, i didn't want *shudder* Vista, so XP it was.. but i also didn't want to lock myself in to 3gb of ram so XP Pro 64bit was really the only option.

I guess this next part of the blog is what you could call "Geek Porn".. and i'm sure there would be some interesting search results for that. Sadly there arhn't any half-naked women in the pictures i took, but there is another thing with its top (ok, its a side) off.

Case front
A bad view of the insides
Huge case fan
Weird pipe to help direct heat from the cpu out of the case
Gotta have clamps..
..and pipes
One screw to secure them all

Thanks for reading, expect another entry in a few days - The return to WLM.

My knowledge of abbreviations has eluded me. WLM?

Oh, and by the way, sounds like a rad machine.

WLM is Windows Live Messenger, aka MSN 8.x

It saddens me that I still have a 2.10 ghz processor and 512 RAM, coupled with a now old Radeon 9550. All these dual-core computers and 2 gb of RAM these days...

I'd get myself some sort of beefed up laptop when I go to college in a few years, then. Probably from Alienware.

Unless building one is easy, but I've never looked into it.

Haha, I'm running on 256 RAM. Fortunately my processor is a little faster than yours. Makes me feel better.

I'm not likely to get (or need) a new computer any time soon, though. Despite its crappy stats, mine is quite reliable and does all I want it to do (recording music and making games) admirably. Of course, I can't play any commercial games that have come out in the past couple years, but just so long as I don't know what I'm missing, it doesn't bother me. Besides, I don't have the bucks to fork out.

The next computer I get will probably be when I go to college, as well. I have some pretty generous relatives.