Death of the Dragonfly

Later this week I will be doing what I love the most: bringing a multitude of computer parts together to build a new computer.

It was in early 2004 that I pooled together some money and over the course of four months purchased all the parts I would need to build a new computer. In March/April of 2004 I finally built my first computer, powered by an Athlon 64 3000+, 512 MB of memory, a 160 GB harddrive, and a Radeon x700 video card. It was a $600 monster that at the time ran all of my games without breaking a sweat. Over the years I have made minor tweaks - a new video card, more memory, and lots of new harddrive space - but nothing at the core changed much, as I was limited by the motherboard and processor that I had.

After several months of research and careful planning, I am letting my current computer - nicknamed "Dragonfly" - slowly run its course into extinction while I get ready to piece together my next rig. I'm not starting entirely from scratch: I have a perfectly good case, tons of hard drive storage, and of course an expensive video card (Radeon x1950) that will service in my new machine just fine.

I'm moving from a pokey (yet utterly efficient) 1.8GHz Athlon 64 to a Core 2 Duo 3.16GHz processor that is pretty close to the top of the gaming heap. I desperately wanted a quad-core system, but prices on the Core 2 Quad line haven't come down to be in line with my budget quite yet. I'm able to score a high-end dual-core processor for under $200, which is awesome. I'm bumping from 1 GB of memory to 4 GB of overclocked DDR3 memory, which will be quite a boost for me in a Windows XP envirnment (I won't be upgrading to Windows 7 until I go quad-core in a few more years).

All in all, I'm spending just over $300 to upgrade my computer to once again be pretty close to the cutting-edge, at least in terms of what my use for it will be (gaming, mostly, as well as serving files off 1.5 TB of media storage, eventually).

For five years I have prided myself on the machine I created and dubbed "Dragonfly," and this weekend I will get to see my next baby come to life, which leaves this parent with a difficult question: what do I name it?

B3 out.