malkav11

It's tax return season which means in turn it's "upgrade malkav11's gaming setup" season. I was contemplating a 360, but the painful truth of the matter is that I spend far more time on my computers than on any of my four consoles. The 360 has some nice games, admittedly - I'm particularly interested by the prospect of Gears of War and Dead Rising - but it is so far terminally lacking on the RPG front (my main genre) much like its predecessor. So that, the $400 price tag, and the inevitable additional expenses in terms of controllers and other paraphernalia rather ruled that out. (I may or may not use the wireless controller(s), but I need at least one wired controller just in case.)

I also gave brief consideration to the other two contenders, but the PS3 is vastly, awesomely overpriced, so no. And the Wii hasn't proved itself yet and is barely in stock anyway. Besides, it weighs in at a price point that doesn't need me to be rolling in tax return money to consider buying it, especially once I (hopefully) land a decent full time job.

No, what I ended up deciding to do is overhaul my computer. Again. I was just going to slap in some DDR2 RAM and maybe bump up to SLI, but it turns out that I'd need a whole new socket type to do DDR2. Pricing it out, I've decided to just do a near-complete overhaul. New (SLI capable) socket AM2 motherboard. 2 gigs of Corsair DDR2 800 (PC6200) RAM (2x1gig kit), which I just bought as the first part of the process (it was on sale. A mere $236, free shipping, $40 mail-in rebate.). New dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 Windsor processor (2 ghz, but a dual-core, cachier 2 ghz than my current 3200+). And if I'm still feeling like I can spare the money, I'll nab a second 7600GT and run me some SLI.

The end product should, I hope, be able to run things like Oblivion at max or near-max settings, if only at 1024x768 (it's not like I want to go higher.).