Geek gear incoming.

I ordered one of these tonight:

It's a Sapphire ATI Radeon 4870 1GB video card. It's a ridiculous beast of a card that grossly outclasses everything else in my PC. And I don't care. I want it.

I'm slowly rebuilding my once mighty PC into a modern gaming rig. When I put it together in early 2006, it wasn't a world-conquering monster, but it was still pretty menacing, and would beat the hell out of just about any game I wanted to play. But over time the upgrades slowed down and finally stopped. I haven't been able to play any new games that I actually want in nearly two years (aside from Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Call of Duty 4, due to their versatile game engines). I've filled the time with older games that I can run well, but that will only take you so far.

So in the last few months I started upgrading again. I bought a new case, a monolithic all-aluminum Rocketfish based on this Lian Li box. Then last week I installed a new 36" rounded EIDE cable for my hard drives (due to the size of the new case and for better cooling) and a very decent Apevia 680W power supply, which jumped from $80 when I bought it to $110 today, so I got lucky there. Now I'm adding a mid-to-high-range vidcard for an absurdly reasonable $150.

That leaves the RAM, which is still just 1GB PC3200, and my processor, a single-core AMD64 4000+. Both are still very usable, and I can upgrade them. The socket 939 is old, but can take a dual-core CPU. But the new vidcard will be downward-compated (so to speak) since I don't have PCI-e 2.0. So the next step really should be to upgrade the motherboard, CPU, and RAM all at once. That can't happen right now, or even in the foreseeable future.

That's why I bought the 4870. It will run anything I throw at it, and should make up for the CPU and RAM for a while. It opens up two to three years worth of games to me (Bioshock, Saint's Row 2, CoD: World at War, Oblivion, Fallout 3), and will make many of the games I already have much, much more enjoyable (S.T.A.L.K.E.R., CoD 4, Ghost Recon: AW, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and more).

Oh, and I bought a Shane Battier Grizzlies replica jersey, the old 2001-2003 style. I've wanted one for eight years. It's in pristine condition and I paid less than four bucks for it. I'm wearing it right now. Pics will follow, because I think of all the stuff I bought today, this one makes me the happiest.