PC PC GAMES

What happened to BeerJedi?  It’s a question I got asked a few times recently as I’ve finally been online gaming again after a near month absence.  So what happened?  Two things happened.

First and foremost, BabyJedi 2 was born in the end of October.  My second daughter was born and she is healthy, at home and refuses to sleep at night.  For us older gamers with families, there is no better day in your life then the birth of a child.  Getting married is a close second.  Needless to say, I’ve been spending countless hours fragging dirty diapers, burping my tiny little girl and warming bottles (and getting zero sleep).

The other (not as important) more prevelant event to pcpcgames.com is I finally upgraded my aging system.  This was a big one for me as I changed a few of my habits when putting together a system.  In the past, I was a efficiency builder.  That’s the best way to describe it.  If you broke down my buying habbits and equipment habits by a MArketing life Cycle: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards, I would normally fall on the line between Early Adopters and Early Majority and then ride my equipment to the end of Late Majority.

Basically put, I’d find the most bang for my buck that was one step or two above mainstream.  I went a different route this time and built a system that for once can handle it’s own against some of main PCPC members.  I’m not the top, but I’m no longer the beggard.

My Original Box I built in the Spring of 2007 (This was a solid box for it’s time):

• E6600 Dual Core Intel Chip
• ASUS Pw5 Deluxe Board
• 8800 GTS Nvidia GPU
• Antec Case
• 2GB of KingstonX DDR2 RAM (later upgraded to 4GB)
• 700 Watt Generic Power Supply
• 250GB Drive (later upgraded to Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB)
• OEM DVD
• Windows XP (and yes, I was on  XP until literally September 2010)
• Copper Fin Bloom Air Based Heat Sync

I started this process focussing on building everything at once, but thanks to input from BlackThunder, I ended up completing the upgrades in 2 phases.  First phase replaced most of the innards.  The second phase replaced the GPU and the Power Supply.

The New BeerJedi Rig:

Phase 1 – The Heart of the System

Images of Phase 1

Phase II: GPU and Power Supply
During the building of the system I ran into a serious problem. It would not boot, after a series of trouble shooiting sessions, I took it over to Scooder’s house and we easily determined that my Powersupply was dead (though it will power my older system still). Thanks to BlackThunder, I returned the original Radeon 5850 GPU and waited till last week.

Once I was done, here is the innards of my new Rig: (and yes, I suck at Cable Management)