Her name is Zoey. We game together. A lot. We like a lot of the same stuff. We stay up late together almost every night. She helps me with school work and knows how to wind down after a tough day. She’s perfect. Just like how I made her. You see, Zoey is the name of my week old desktop. I needed a new desktop after not updating for about 7 years.

Back in 2002, I bought a computer for about $500 and it was pretty good at the time. If I remember correctly, it was an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ on a ECS K7S5A with 512MB RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce MX-440. Played Counter-Strike pretty well. I remember upgrading the RAM on it to 1GB later and then switching over to an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro in 2004. Some time after that, I was playing around with flashing the bios and fried the K7S5A and got an ASUS board whose model name escapes me. Soon after that, my sister ended up get a beast of a computer that I arranged and built (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS) and I got her old computer that I also arranged and built for her, which was powered by an Intel P4 2.4GHz. I ended up breaking the 9800 Pro and switched it in for an X1650 and that’s what I’ve had until last Thursday.

I blame Valve for me wanting a new desktop. They posted the specs of their current machines and the specs of the machines they’ll be replacing them with. After reading through them, I decided to see how much one of their computers would cost.

I shop at Canada Computers and with their prices in February, that PC costs in the ballpark of $2500. I tried watering down the specs with a i7 920, 6GB RAM, GTX 260, and one hard drive and it came up to around $1500. I thought about the technologies and what I needed and what I didn’t need and if the price was worth it. I ended up with this configuration:

If you saw my tweet, she’s a 8668 on 3DMark Vantage. I haven’t taken any game benchmarks but she doesn’t lag with Left 4 Dead on full settings. I’ve been playing Far Cry 2 on Full Settings on DX9 because the terrain discolours in DX10. I don’t know why. Unreal Tournament 3 on Full Settings is also ridiculous. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and BioShock are also very yummy with Zoey. Mirror’s Edge and Need for Speed Undercover were good too but the “try-before-you-buy” copies I got died on me which makes me want to buy the games since they’re quite fun. Maybe I should get DIRT. I want a good racer. Any other suggestions to what I should be oogling over?

But anyway, the final total for those parts was $920. I already had a case, monitor, keyboard, mouse, mic, webcam and speakers so I didn’t bother with those.