Goodbye grades, grad school

In what could best be described as an attempt to pamper myself, I’ve decided to build a computer capable of playing Doom ]|[. And play it, of course. I’ve decided to document some of the stuff along the way. You needn’t be afraid people. It’s just a game.

It all begins with intelligent selection of components. You first look at what you want done, and determine the hardware that will suffice, falling within the rough budget you’d initially decided on. You then drool over far cooler hardware, throw the budget out of the window and buy those components instead. The following is the current list of stuff I need to buy/have already bought leading toward that rig. Suggestions and so on are welcome.

  1. Motherboard – Asus P4C800-E DELUXE
  2. Processor – Intel Pentium 4 3.0E GHz, 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache, HT
  3. Memory – Crucial 512MB DDR PC-3200 (x4 = 2GB)
  4. Video Card – ATI RADEON X800 PRO, 256MB GDDR3
  5. Audio Card – Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
  6. Monitor – NEC MultiSync FP912SB 19″ CRT (I prefer CRTs to LCDs)
  7. Speakers – Logitech Z640 5.1 Speakers
  8. Hard drive 1 – Western Digital Special Edition 120GB 7200RPM IDE
  9. Hard drive 2 – Undecided (Higher RPM, smaller drive)
  10. Keyboard – Undecided
  11. Mouse – Logitech MX500 Optical Mouse
  12. CD/DVD R – Pioneer 16X DVD-ROM
  13. CD/DVD R/W – Plextor 12X DVD+RW/-RW Drive, Model PX-712A
  14. Floppy Drive – Mitsumi 1.44MB 3.5Inch Floppy Disk Drive
  15. Ethernet Card – Undecided, in addition to the inbuilt one
  16. Case – Undecided
  17. Thermal paste – Artic Silver 5
  18. Additional power/cooling – Undecided, depends on case

Am I missing anything?

Well wahgnube, the 2.5 grand or whatever all of this will eventually cost seems mighty steep to just play a game, is it really that cool?

How could you ask me such a question. It has a brilliant story line, it will rock. You have this Union Aerospace Corporation see, and they’re performing these super secret teleportation technology experiments, and (not surprisingly) due to some miscalculations and some arrogance, the UAC opens a portal to hell. Of course, the demons invade. And it’s your job to stop this invasion and prevent the Earth from being overrun by this demonic invasion.

Sheer brilliance, told ya. *Drool*

4 thoughts on “Goodbye grades, grad school”

  1. For the serious games, try to evade wireless mice or keyboards , because a micro second lag could lead to your annihilation in Doom.

    Looks pretty high end, are you going in with HT for your processor ?
    CRT sounds the way to go though the LCD”s ( esp. NEC’s are getting close to the CRT performance )

    cheerio. ananth

  2. Nope, no wireless mice (or keyboards). Tempted to go for the Logitech MX700 but bought the MX500 instead.

    Yes, the processor is HT. I have updated the post to detail this better.

    I use LCDs everywhere, and I haven’t yet seen one that can reproduce colour as brilliantly as a CRT. Even font rendering, unless the resolution is at the LCD’s native resolution, everything looks blurred and sucks in general.

  3. Just a thought, why don’t you go in for a 64 Bit processor , mmmaybe a AMD though heating could be a bit of a problem in them, but you get performance.

  4. For work things, I use intel compilers and quite processor specific optimizations in my code. (Considering my laptop and first line of parallel machines are all intel). I’ve taken a lot of time on this and it’s beginning to rock. So an intel cpu is a given. I’ve moved to a 64 bit architecture once (on a parallel SGI) and irritating things like difference in sizes of primitives (like float or whatever) caused rather hard to find problems. I don’t want to be doing such things at home also.

    Oh, that and I’ve burnt two (over-overclocked) AMDs in the past. Not pretty.

Comments are closed.