Early Christmas For Me

The government finally coughed up the rest of money they owed my wife (after forcing us to live on starvation wages for three months). I was able to pay all of my current bills, buy groceries and replace some things around the house that needed it. While this was a cause for celebration (we went to dinner) an even happier thing occurred afterwards (no, not referring to the sex, you perverts).

My wife (Bless her soul) has been quietly putting aside a little money for a Christmas gift for me, and yesterday she gave it to me - all the pieces for a new computer (some assembly required). She has been conspiring with my friend Hector (the ex-Cuban army sniper at work) who is something of a computer nerd, and builds his own systems.

Tomorrow morning I will be lugging my current computer, plus all of the new components, over to Hector's place. The wife and I will play some tennis on the courts at his apartment complex, while Hector assembles my new rig. We're keeping the old case, hard drive, DVD writer, power supply, (etc) and replacing the motherboard, processor, RAM, graphics card, and cooling system.

The new system will have:
AMD Phenom II X3 705e 2.5Ghz triple core processor
Gigabyte 880GM-D2H AM3+ motherboard (Micro ATX)
Galaxy GTS 450 (1 Gb) Nvidia graphics card
Kingston 4Gb 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM (can take two sticks for a total of 8, but only bought the one stick for now)
TR2-R1 heat sink and cooling fan (for the processor)

Considering that I am currently running a dual core AMD 64 (3 Gb DDR2 RAM) and a 7900 GS Nvidia card (which doesn't even come close to meeting the minimum recommended for WW2OL), this should be like upgrading from a 1972 Oldsmobile station wagon to a 2005 Porsche. Hector assures me that it will be very little trouble to rebuild my computer, and should take less than 2 hours. Of course, I build things for a living, so I expect it may not go as smoothly as he says, so I'm a little nervous. On the other hand, this will be the first serious upgrade to my computer in five years, so I'm excited!

Assuming the best, I will be offline for the weekend, as my machine gets rebuilt, then has all the software reinstalled, etc. Preparing for the worst, I told Hector to keep all the old parts (and remove them without damaging them) so if something does go badly wrong, I can restore my machine to the way it is now. (He just laughed and said 'Don't worry, I will build your new system, no trouble, you will see.')

An early Christmas for me!

Acroyer it sounds like you have the perfect wife ! Sounds like money has been scarce but she still manages to squirrel away enough to get you a new pc. Not only that but you still get sex after dinner !

Id be interested to see how the new build performs as Im often considering an upgrade but Im not sure how mad to go. You can buy people for the cost of some pcs !

Well, I started looking at the 'Budget Build' article in the WW2OL forums they did back in 2009, and the update to it from 2010. I thought that I might be able to buy the same parts cheaper (as prices have gone down) and get a computer specifically guaranteed by the Rats to be able to play the game well. I was doing all of the research, then gave up because it was still like 400-500 bucks for everything, which was simply out of the question given our financial situation.

My wife knew that Hector builds computers, so she showed him my notes (without telling me) and asked if he could find a way to do it cheaper. He pointed out that I didn't need to replace all of the peripherals, since I already had an adequate hard drive, DVD burner, and so forth. I could also use the existing case if I picked the right sized mother board, and my power supply (which I replaced several years ago with the biggest I could afford at the time) was more than sufficient at 600 watts. So that knocked a bunch of the cost off the project right there. I could have even stayed with the existing graphics card, but they had one GTS 450 on sale at 99.00 with a 40.00 mail in rebate, so I got an outstanding card for 60 bucks. That was kind of an impulse purchase, but I figured if we're going to upgrade, go for the better graphic card now.

And you are right, I have an awesome wife. I could not be more happily married. Now if I could only get her to stop feeding me so much food, I could lose some weight.

aw sounds good acroyer.

I'm a little worse for chirstmas wear myself though, so Imm going to berd.

Gnight!

"I'm a little worse for chirstmas wear myself though, so Imm going to berd"

You are starting early Skip its only the 11th !