Subtlety

Following my little exercise for the Media Centre PC, it turns out that Serena has been speccing out an upgrade to our primary gaming PC (reasons to follow). An off-hand comment yesterday made me laugh - "we can do a pretty quick and dirty upgrade for £400". That triggered a bit of a debate and it turned out the the £400 "quick and dirty" was really an £1,100 build a new machine and using the existing one as a server!

I laugh because I was worried about thinking about spending £800 on a new machine, whilst all along Serena had ideas slightly higher up the food chain! We now have rough specs for £2,000 worth of PC kit! The only question remaining is "when" (can we afford to put it on the credit card)!

Serena tries to be subtle at times and she is either too subtle (in that I don't notice) or is a bit too unsubtle so that I notice straight away! I much prefer the latter as it causes less arguments.

Anyway she has been talking about a particular computer game for a while now, "look what a good write up it got", leaving various magazine articles open on that particular page or websites open in the same fashion!
When I asked whether we should buy the game she informed me of the cheapest website to buy it from! (BlahDVD - never heard of them before).

Once ordered I had a quick look at the required specs for the game and realised that our laptop wouldn't go near it and our main PC would struggle to display much beyond the lower graphical settings. When I informed Serena, that was when the £400 quick and dirty comment popped out!

There are times when I wonder who is the bigger nerd in our house! The only difference being I am well out of the closet!

PS The game is question is "Lord of the Rings Online - Shadows of Angmar".

PPS Here is what £1,100 buys you:

• Case (TBD)
• Power supply (650 W one with good voltage stability)
• Motherboard (TBD - but there is a good ASUS one with build in WiFi that Serena has spotted)
• Processor (Intel Core 2 Duo - at least a 6420)
• Heatsink (the Freezer one that allows good overclocking)
• Video Card (Pre-overclocked 8800 GTS 640 MB)
• RAM (2 x 2 GB)
• Hard Disks (2 of the Spinpoints as seen in the Media Centre)
• Sound Card (X-Fi Gamer Edition)
• OS (Windows Vista Home Edition)
• Keyboard and Mouse (Logitech Gamer Set)

I have the feeling that this could be quite noisy, so the case will need to be well soundproofed!