A NEW RIG PLANNED!!

Well the winter is approaching ... or here now it feels like with the weather whirling around outside my door and the time has come as it does each year for me to build a new rig.

Only most years I never manage to do this, or end up doing it for other people who fail to realise and appreciate how much money you have saved them before you go back to doing other chores I happen to be very good at, like looking after their aquatic pets that resided outdoors, indoors, temperate, tropical and brackish! I digress.

This year I am planning for this to be different and oddly most of what I had wanted for several years now are about to have their second generations launched while others have come down to more sensible, albeit still high, prices.

I shall now list these...

AMD FX-8350 CPU
AMD RADEON HD 8870 Graphics
256GB OCX Vertex 4 SSD or 128GB x2 RAID 0
GIGABYTE 990FX MOTHERBOARD

(usually would use Asus motherboard  and likely Crosshair V (Z?) but not after what I'm reading!)


It is currently the 8th October 2013 and the CPU is due to be launched in a couple of weeks? Hopefully! The graphics I was surprised to read is about to be launched too and could be about the same time or up until December but with my luck probably January. But then I might not have the cash until then at any rate, if I manage to acquire it at all?!

Despite the so called 'bedroom or armchair' experts out there harping on about IPC and that multi-threaded programs and games are not out there so more (moar) cores are pointless I will go this path...

...as despite what the so-called 'bedroom and armchair' experts out there (oh did I mention suddenly biased magazines I used to buy regularly?) they have failed to take a couple of things into consideration...

i. Multiple cores have ... well been about a bit and software DOES exist to take advantage of it, more appears all the time and within a year or two there will likely be a great deal coded for it and this coding improves over time which leads me onto...

ii. Benchmarks are just GUIDES, they are not the be all and end all, you did not code them, these things are intricate, the algorithms, branching and coding that goes on in code is ... A MINEFIELD so please do not presume to know firstly how they work and what the results they give out actually mean. Not even I would do that!

iii. Making stupid statements that you cannot game on the first Bulldozer chips is ... well just showing you up for being STUPID!!! I should also add that if you are only worried about IPC then you cannot call yourself an enthusiast as, well you can only be running Windows and one or two others at the same time?! Odd this is I mean you do not need all these cores?! But Windows will use a fair few on its own, then you may have other programs running, playing music while video-encoding while typing a letter with a Browser Open watching the football updates? No?!

Oh dear! These new fandangled PCs can do that you know?! LMAO.

So the statements 'this is too many' or 'that is too powerful' and 'you will not need that' and 'that is more than enough' are the oldest and therefore the most stupid and naive statements to ever be made in the computing world.

i.e. In the first year of my degree at Middlesex University BSc Single Honours Applied Computing my fellow students, some older and some younger made all the above statements to me when I bought my machine! This I reacted to with a confused look and a raised eyebrow to which they said 'WHAT?' lmao and I then explained what I did here. Maybe they thought I could have got away with using my original computer, a Commodore VIC-20, or my Commodore Amiga, or a ZX Spectrum or even a ZX-81?!?! My PC righ at the time? I will list the main ingredients ...

Pentium II
3.5GB Hard drive
Matrox Graphics Card, late switched to a Voodoo Card
GOD KNOWS WHAT THE RAM WAS!

I will never use the power of the CPU but was having slow downs in 6 months. I will never use up the hard drives 3.5GB and they were shocked when I had actually scaled this down from 4.5 when I ordered from Mesh Computers?! Was running out of space on this hard rive in 6 months and regretted scaling down?!

Dare I actually make my own mistake and actually admit that I have had the feeling that it is hard to see this continuing for very much longer? Admittedly and with the graphics being as good as they are, even on my Phenom X3 HP Pavilion DV7 and the AMD Radeon HD5470M Graphics that the results I get are even impressive on this compared to the last time I played games. Sure there is room for improvement but a gargantuan amount less so that there once was and even the current graphics to end on desktops is way, WAY beyond what this is capable of.

Indeed with these armchair experts regularly scoffing at people asking if they can play Elder Scrolls V Skyrim on a leptop with my graphics chip in it my Fallout 3 (also by Bethesda) looks pretty neat on my machine and I am constantly wowed by things I see and I keep thinking 'my God what must these games look like if your running an AMD Radeon 6000 or 7000 series or nVidia 480, 500 or above??

With these things in mind and with the 8000 series Radeon and 700 series GFs not far behind I would likely be salivating at the lips at the thought of the looks of the games that would max out these cards? I also ask myself how long a wait that would be?! One year? Two years? Three maybe?

Oh no, what am I thinking?! The PC Games industry will be dead by then?!?! LMAO!