John Mort's Weblog

Since our tax return was generous this year, the financial overlords (a.k.a., trian) have finally approved my building a new system, and even upped my budget from $800 to $1000! So I've been pouring over hardware stats and wikipedia for the last week, struggling to learn everything I haven't been able to afford since I last built a system and thus didn't keep up with.

For awhile now I've been trying to figure out how to fit a quad core cpu into my budget. My thinking is that even though there really isn't any practical use for a quad core system right now, if I have a quad right now, once programmers start taking advantage of such environments my PC will be able to take advantage of such features, and thus it will have more life. Thing is, I only have so much I can throw at a CPU since I also need the motherboard, RAM, case, power supply, optical drive, etc.

High end quad cores run over $1000, which make them not an option. So I poked around on newegg and found a few that run for ~$250, but they're 2.4ghz. Newegg also has some dual core 3ghz processors for about that much, and thus I have a dilemma. Do I take a slower processor that can handle a larger workload that might be useful in the future (but also might be too slow for all practical purposes), or do I take a significantly faster processor that can only handle half the workload, but who's speed might make it tolerable in the future?

So over to freenode I go and visit ##hardware where I'm told:
< wols> no one can foresee 4 years of hardware
< wols> and I can tell you that in 4 years your GPU will be very obsolete no matter what
< L4m3r> yeah, stupid me built a 939 system, and I'm not gonna be able to afford a new box any time soon
< wols> Mortuis: rule of thumb: anything you don't need for 18 months is wasted money when bought right now

So, it looks like the smart move is the dual core processor. Which is hard for me right now, because I was sort of getting attached to the idea of being able to watch four processor graphs going to work on my system, but really they're right, it's better to go with what I know will be useful. And the reality is that with the motherboard I'm looking at, there are a lot of processors available, so in theory if I really did need to move to quad core I would be able to just swap the processor.

Unless something comes along and makes this motherboard obsolete and not worth upgrading like my old one, which in hindsight was built for what would be useful at the time, and has served us rather well, surviving a few hard drive and optical drive failures.