Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

I’m pretty excited I ordered my new gaming system this morning.  It is my Christmas Present to myself / Reward for working so hard / Not going to buy a new Mac computer.  I decided since my Mac, now going on 4 years old is still fine for everything I do that upgrading it seemed like an incorrect use of funds.  Even selling the old one would put me out over $2k or more for a current Mac Pro.  Not to mention Mac’s have never been optimized for Games, and the Mac version of WoW has always lagged a bit behind the PC version.  I decided to order a gaming system, and just get a KVM to switch between them.   I’m pretty excited about this because by nature I’m an old Gamer, and an old hardware freak.  I used to upgrade my computer every 3 months before I met my wife

I speced out a machine from a very cool company called iBuyPower.com.  They let you build totally custom PC’s and don’t charge you an arm and a leg for them.  I’ve played with people before who use their machines, and newegg, another company well respected by me sells their machines as well.  So after much thought and research over the past month or so I decided on the following.

I decided to go with the 920 CPU because of the price point.  To go up one processor was more than $260 which just didn’t seem worth it to me.  Instead I opted to get the right MB, CPU fan, and system cooling to do a little over clocking   I haven’t done that in a long time either!  I was reading though and it appears that getting 3.8Ghz out of the 920 is pretty normal.  I decided to go with the ATI HD 5870 graphics card because of the price and speed of the single card.  The highest end GeForce card was still beating it slightly, but it was $200+ more.  The ATI card is also a little more future proof with DX11 support already.

I’m sure this system will run WoW quite well, and am looking forward to a few other upcoming Blizzard games   A non Blizzard game I’m particularly interested in getting as well is Dragon Age: Origins.  I’ve read a lot of good reviews of it and have enjoyed BioWare RPG games in the past.  Hopefully the system isn’t delayed too badly by the HD 5870 shortages I keep reading about.  I decided I better order it and “get in line” so to speak