New PC - should I wait, or should I go?
After much consideration, my perfect ‘next’ PC’s specifications have been decided for quite a while now:
- Quad-core CPU (or Octo-core if they’re decently priced by then)
- 16GB DDR3 memory (as I understand, DDR3 is slightly faster while requiring quite a bit less power - compared to DDR2)
- SSD hard drive (must be affordable, quick, and either ~120GB or more, or very affordable ($100 or so for 500GB))
The rest of the PC doesn’t really matter much… Gigabit onboard LAN is more than plenty, any internal 20x DVD-RW would do (or hell, I might just stick to my external 8x one - not much interest in blu-ray here to be honest), affordable (upgradable) graphics card or even my 8800GT if it’s still got decent performance (doubtful as I bought it to get 1080p (1920×1080 resolution) for current games), and on-board sound or perhaps a Creative X-Fi card for EAX…
Lately I’ve been itching to upgrade my old rig. I kept telling people it was 4-5 years old, so a few days ago I decided to check my receipt (keep it for warranty!), it’ll be two years old in another two weeks. Good lord! It feels much older (a.k.a. slower). It’s got decent gear (an AMD X2 4200+, 2GB ram, now an 8800GT (was an ATi X1600 XT), and a 250gb seagate as system drive), but I suspect my RAID5 is clogging up the SATA ports and thus the entire system. If I ever have another RAID5, an off-board PCI-E controller will be the first thing I look into…
So, following up on my itch to get a new system, I looked into pricing a bit… Quad-cores are fairly cheaply available. I’d suggest waiting a few more months for more models to arrive and medium-ranged models to get priced down but it’s certainly do-able. News gets worse when I get to memory… 4 sticks of 2GB of DDR2 ram would be affordable, but no more. 4GB sticks of DDR2 - as well as 2GB sticks of DDR3 - are far too pricey and I simply couldn’t even find any 4GB sticks of DDR3.
SSD news would seem to be quite well, but it would only fool impulsive buyers (which, after much training, I am slowly moving away from being myself). OCZ has come out with ‘cheap’ drives fulfilling my bare minimum of 64GB (found one for as ‘little’ as €210+shipping). However, further research reveals that - while (on average) marginally faster than a SATA drive - it has horrid random-write problems which can cause windows to appear ‘locked’, performance falling to an appalling 10% of expected. I just read OCZ will be releasing Core V2 soon (and increasing maximum size from 128GB to 256GB), which is good news despite no hint at whether or not said problems would be fixed. Still, after all that I’d recommend myself to wait 6-12 months at the very least.
So there you have it, my advice to myself is to wait at least a year. Of course, there’s always something better ‘just around the corner’, I feel that affordable SSD (despite other improvements, this would stand out by far) is well worth waiting for. As a bonus, SSD sizes should increase by then. Let’s just hope a shortage of manufacturing capabilities don’t keep prices high as demand is sure to soar.
