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You know, if there’s one thing that girls do best at, but guys suck at, it’s definately got to be shopping. The almighty cult of an obsession with a core foundation mainly consisting of seasonly all year round displayed cardboards of multiple shapes, sizes and color imprinted with only the four devious letters many working people fear of : SALE.
Today I went on one of my most "impromptu-est" shopping sprees, peripherals for the dinosaur of a computer in the living room. It all began just yesterday when after catching up with Naqy, Teik and Fazrin that they showed me how impressive the driving simulator LFS (Live For Speed) has evolved. Instantly I was hooked to return to it’s shores, but how? My P4 rig is still down, it’s so damn heavy that I get de-motivated by simply trying to lift it into place, and the living room P4 is just fecked!
So after dinner I thought of a plan, what if I could replace the processor, motherboard and graphic card from the living room PC with something slightly upscaled, and use it for more than just living room internet surfing, if you get what I’m saying. I used to be a gamer mah, during secondary 3 and 4 also addicted to anything that runs on Steam, Battlefield and LFS as it’s crack or something. Spoke to Khole on MSN for a moment, and I was sure I’m going to get this rig running.
2 hours, 11 price checks and 5 phone calls later, I had it in my hands. The list of peripherals to revive my long lost gaming enthusiasm. It all looked so simple, I was SURE it was incorrect, cause as per the calculation it’s RM45 shy of the 1k mark. The specs were average, but surely could do what I wanted it to do well. P4 3.0, 1gig DDR (to be coupled with my current 2×512), x1950xt, 80gb, 945 motherboard, standard chassis with 450w PSU. The works la basically. All this for less than 1k, I bet you’re getting doubtful as we speak. I don’t blame you though, read on..
So Sunday arrived, I headed out to Lowyat after lunch to do more research, but as I was as tired as heck since I slept at 7 that morning waiting for *somebody* to reply my messages, I only had Czone, Cycom and All IT on my list. First stop was Atom however, only grabbed a price list, then Czone only price list and finally Cycom. Standing there in the heavy traffic of people seeking the ultimate computeing experience, I briefly ran through the lists looking for the items I wanted.
Czone was kicked out immediately, they discontinued the P4 to only push Core2Duos and Dual Cores. Atom had a good price on the processor but I figure I’ve always trusted Cycom and Czone only, so off to Cycom I went thinking I was only going for a price quote. Next thing you know, item by item the prices didn’t seem to come out right, prices were identical but I found myself in a situation where I had to splurge extra on some items which replaced an obsolete one such as the casing and PSU.
Long story short, next thing you know I was infront of a whole new rig, with a whole new price tag and I was too tired to think about surveying anywhere else. As of now, I had a Core2Duo, P35 chipset motherboard and a 2600XT HD, a graphic card I’ve never even heard of before prior to the visit. Yet again, too tired to think about it, I told the guy to go for it.
Without even thinking about how much other shops would offer, I was about to splurge on something that is still fairly foreign to me, namely the 2600XT and Core2Duo. I guess this is the nature of how guys shop, 1 hour spending RM3000 instead of the ladies which spend 3 hours spending RM1000 :-/ So yeah, I got myself literally a new system now, yay! Salvaged only the chassis, optical drives and one of the hard drives. Couldn’t salvage the ram as I opted to go for DDR2, double yay!
Triple boohoo for the wallet though as the total spendature broke the budget by a.. slightly milder than mild, RM820, sigh. I hope all this makes the experience worth it, cause if it’s not, then I swear I’m going to stop gaming with my own PC for the rest of my non-working days. Take a dive into it’s specs, I find it quite impressive but I’m pretty sure it’s average compared to the nutcases out there who spend up to 10k on their PCs for god knows what reasons except for gaming.
Intel Core2Duo 4400 2.0GHZ 800FSB 2MB CPU
2GB DDR2 677MHz RAM
Sapphire HD 2600XT 256MB 128bit Graphic Card
Western Digital 800JG 80GB SATA HDD1
Western Digital 200GB PATA HDD2
Gigabyte iP35 chipset motherboard, up to 1066FSB
That’s all the information that matters, proud to announce that it’s 4.35AM now and the system is finally UP! now installing the drivers and soon followed by the games, it’s gonna be a gaming day later today, whee! But the point that I’m trying to convey in this post after all is that, guys seriously can’t shop like how girls can but hey, at least we’re catching up on amount xP
Now, anyone got suggestions for names for this humble Iswara (I quote Seh Ming) of a PC?
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P/S : Good luck for your driving test, Kheng! Don’t grab the wrong stick now, hahah! I’ll be rooting for you 
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