After work I went shopping and aquired a Dell XPS 8300. I named her Dalia since it’s a Dell, and found it approriate when I looked up the meaning of the name. It is basically Deliliah in the tongue native to where it was assembled, and traces to the hebrew word for branch; apt because this computer is a part of a different branch of my life than the PaC it is replacing.
The difference between my old Pentium D 930 (3.0Ghz x2) amd the new i5 2320 (3.0-3.3Ghz x4) is noticable but the old Pentium was plenty fast enough for me. Having 8GB of DDR3 RAM not so much, as after five years I only started surpassing the need for one gig out of SAL1600’s 2GB DDR2 but I’m sure it won’t need any upgrading for the machines life.
What is sad! The piddly Radeon HD6450 is so much better than my aging GeForce 8400 GS, that I can run L4D2 at recommended settings at a pretty steady 60 FPS. Tuned up to my monitors native 1980×1080 resolution and slightly higher settings, I get a very playable 35-45 FPS. By contrast if I set the settings up to the MAX—I get the frame rate my old PC gave me at like low and 1024×768 or 1280×1024. Like wise at the normal resolution I was playing Killing Floor last night with maximum graphics and awesome frame rates.
SAL1600 served 5 years, as did Dixie. Vectra more or less same but with more upgrades, as that was possible by salvage. I would like Dalia to get at least 3-4 years. I am cheap enough to kick SAL1600 into another 5 years but as someone close to me, then it wouldn’t be fun to play on lol.