PC Upgrades used to be something I enjoyed. I would crack my case at any given opportunity to show off the amazing cable job I did, flaunt my new graphics card, HD configuration etc. As I got older and more and more vendors started producing more and more sub standard hardware with crappy drivers I slowly moved away from upgrading or even building my own PC. I would buy…. and by god if I was gonna buy I bought good.

My current rig is an Alienware box I got about 3 years ago. It has held up well. The AMD 64 X2 Dual Core AMD processor and My Dual nVidia 6 series SLI cards made WOW look amazing, blazed through Hell Gate London and have never failed to meet the requirements of any game I wanted to play (no I did not want to play crysis). Now I have downloaded and installed Age of Conan, much to my surprise I just crossed the threshold of minimum requirements. Therefore I embark upon my question today to upgrade my rig.

To-date myself the last time I cracked open my own I had a Pentium II in it. So I had to being the research to find out what I could add to my rig, and what I could replace. My first road-block SOCKETS!!!! why the hell do people feel the need to change the socket requirements on the motherboards more often then I change my socks. Come to find out I have the fastest processor my board can support given the existing socket. As a result of this finding I decided not to upgrade my motherboard nor my chip. So all smooth right? No! next problem is RAM, what the hell why is RAM phasing out so fast. I have DDR1, now there is DDR3; and DDR1 is now CRAZY expensive… ok I suck it up and buy 4 gigs of ram tossing out my existing 2 gigs.

So now that I have sunk 250$ into ram i turn my attention to my small, itty bitty 60 gig harddrive. Alas I get a break and buy a kick ass hard drive for under 100$. Next I turn my attention to my video cards! WOOT yet another area that I can upgrade without any major issues. I am now running dual SLI nVidia 8 series with 512 meg ram per card.

Next I break open the case and install all my new lovely hardware and boot it up. What do you expect happened? Well much to my supprise the machine booted up no issues, everything is working great then 2 of my fans in my rig die!

HOLY CRAP!!!! WHY CAN I NOT CATCH A BREAK!!!!

I am now off to go buy 2 new fans for my case…. Maybe one of these days I will be able to actully play the game I bought.