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August 14, 2004

Upgrading for Doom 3

Played Doom 3 at NVidia's SIGGRAPH booth and decided it was time to get that upgrade I've been delaying. Being the tightwad skinflint money-McSave-a-lot that I am, the upgrade quest turned into hours of brushing up on the latest PC hardware jargon and building an internal model of the precedences of various technologies, then off to Fry's to buy components on sale.

As compared with the last time I did this (spring of 2002), some things were better, others were worse. Most noticeable changes: my motherboard now screams like a banshee with whiplash in the back of a speeding ambulance if anything's misconnected. It took me about ten minutes to figure out how to silence the beast (the CPU fan was reporting an error even though it was spinning just fine). The power-on-self-test LED is a welcome addition. The CPU came pre-lubed with silver thermal paste (had to apply it myself last time--not difficult but time-consuming). Overall, the process was simpler but I kept feeling like the CPU was going to melt when the power was switched on.

Last upgrade took me way above the at-the-time current generation of game graphics (Quake 3), and this lasted until the middle of last year. This time around, I forked over more cash, ran into more problems, and ended up further behind the curve. Either I'm older and dumber or PC self-assembly is becoming more difficult. I prefer to believe the latter, since it means there's room for improvement in basic PC hardware design. I can imagine chip manufacturers solving these problems by scouting out HCI experts and usability engineers to figure out how to improve the "user experience" of DIY PC assembly.

Posted by Devon at August 14, 2004 03:25 AM

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