Mike's Computer Upgrade Update

Hey everyone it's Mike!

So as some of you know, my computer is pretty bad. As of today the video card is officially dying because it won't let me play for 20 minutes without bugging out. But today my brother came over and I asked him to help me out with my computer upgrades so I knew what I was looking for and I thought I'd share with you what my computer will soon become!!!!
To achieve this I'll need to get 3 more paychecks. The third paycheck I get August 11 so I plan on buying almost all my upgrades that weekend (minus some of the cooling units and a bit of RAM).

So to begin, my video card. My current video card is an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro. Old. I know. The new video card I plan on getting is an AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB chipset. I plan on crossfiring two of these hopefully after my fourth paycheck. One of these cards will cost me $200.

My motherboard is the first thing I need to buy since that's really important. I don't know my current motherboards' specs but I know it can only host 2GB of RAM and is pretty bad. The new board I want to get is the Asus Crosshair V Formula Socket AM3+ AMD 990FX + SB950 Chipset. I've heard GREAT reviews about it and it's a huge upgrade from my current motherboard. It can actually hold 32GB of RAM which I intend on filling up because it'll help video editing and gaming. The motherboard costs $230. I plan on buying 2 12GB (3x4GB) DDR3 2000MHz RAM packages along with an 8GB Ram pack to fill up the rest of it. When I first go out to buy all this stuff I'll only get 12GB of RAM because I don't need 32GB right off the start. The 12GB pack costs $200.

My current processor I got back in December, if some of you remember, after my previous one stopped working. I don't know exact specs but I believe it runs at 2.3 GHZ. The new processor I plan on getting is the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 3.3GHz, 9Mb Cache, 2000MHz processor. HUGE upgrade, again. This will cost me $200.

Initially I was planning on buying a 3.5TB hard drive with 7200 RPM for like $70 but my brother said if I'm doing gaming or editing I should invest in a 10k RPM hard drive, despite the fact the space on them isn't massive. So I plan on getting a Western Digital 600GB 10000RPM 32MB cache hard drive. I believe I'll be able to slot in more than one hard drive in my computer now so I might pick up one of the 3.5TB ones later on. But the 600GB 10k RPM hard drive is going to cost me $250.

But besides that the only other things I plan on buying are a video card fan and CPU fan which should collectively total around $200.

The initial things I'm going to buy will total me around $1200 after taxes. In total, once I buy EVERYTHING I want, upgrading my computer will have cost me $1500+. That sounds about right for a pretty good computer. My initial plan was to buy the parts as I got the money and install it all once I had everything but I decided to wait until I had all the money so I could buy it all together and install it all because that way I don't have one of the parts sitting in my room for a month then when I install it it turns out to be broken and my 30 day warranty in store is over and I need to take it back to the manufacturer which takes longer.

So yeah, I'm STOKED for the upgrades to start rolling in. I'll be patiently waiting this next month out. I'll see what I can do about videos but my guess is there won't be much/anything from me until August. But when I come back I assume the videos will not only be back, but with super-fantastic-omfgitlookslikereallife! ultra high settings. Oh the joys of being a PC gamer. :)