Now that the Vista release is officially right around the corner, I have an excuse to make some hardware upgrades to my workstation box (no, I don't really need new hardware, but then again who really does).  After doing some research, I was actually quite pleasantly surprised to find that my almost 2 year old motherboard (Abit Fatal1ty AN8) still supports modern hardware, i.e. it's a very scalable/extensible board so I won't have to overhaul the entire box.  That makes Jay a happy geek as I don't feel like gutting my entire system just to eek out an extra half a point on the Vista performance scale (I keed).  So, here's my geek wishlist for Christmas:

• Ditching my AMD Athlon 64 3500+ and upgrading to an AMD Athlon X2 4800+ Dual Core.  As of now that processor pushes the limits of the socket 939 boards to just about their max for a very reasonable sub $300 price tag...I'm very impressed that my board will support this much extra horsepower.
• One of the best hardware purchases I've ever made was my Western Digital Raptor...74 gigs spinning at 10,000 RPMs pushed through a SATA 1.5 interface.  I don't remember what I paid for it (it was definitely high on the $/gig ratio), but the throughput increase is immediately noticeable.  My first thought was to just bump up to the 150 gig model, but a geek IM session with Bob got us on the topic of RAID...the new 150 gig Raptors are 330 bucks and I wouldn't get any performance benefits at all.  For less than half that, I can snap up another 74 gig Raptor and implement either a stripe or mirrored set due to (yet again) the scalability of my board: built in hardware RAID support for SATA. I will more than likely go the RAID 1 route as storage space on my system drive(s) isn't a concern, and the performance + redundancy benefits are fantastic.
• This will not be an immediate upgrade as my existing ATI XL800 card is still performing beautifully in most scenarios, but I'll end up going with one of the current generation ATI X1600 or X1900 cards in the $200-$250 range; you can get a ton of performance for the 200 dollar range these days.  Or I might wait for the next gen ATI cards to come out and wait for the X1950 prices to fall.  I'll play the wait and see game for now.
• And finally, an upgrade that is about 1 year overdue: I must get another 1 gig DIMM of RAM, especially since Visual Studio 2005 is such an enormous memory hog...a couple of instances of that plus a fully loaded Firefox session (and Outlook, various messengers, etc) page like crazy...sometimes I think my machine is going to levitate, or rattle itself apart it's so loud.

So for around 500 bucks (sans video adapter) I'll basically be getting an all new machine (from a performance perspective at least).  Subtract the 100 or so dollars I can get for the old components and it's an even better deal.  Order shall be placed within the next month or so...god bless NewEgg.

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