I bought my computer nearly 8 years ago. Which as far as computers go is a thousand years. Since then I have upgraded the hard drive (twice), power supply, RAM, graphics card, all the fans. But it doesn’t disguise that it’s still a 800 year old processor sitting on a motherboard that dinosaurs would have laughed at.
I was sitting watching it render a not uncomplex image the other day and decided it’s time for an upgrade. It was at this point that my “computer”, reading my mind, decided to have an existence failure. How did it know what I was thinking? Oh, it still works, after a reboot. But I can tell it’s in a bad mood since I have to coax it to do anything more complicated than add two single digit numbers together. Even then I have to check the result against my phone.
I started looking around. Upgrading to a nice quad-core. How nice would that be? Apparently, Victorians had Quad core computers. Not sure what I was thinking. Even my phone has a quad-core. It seems that eight cores is the way forward these days.
I don’t play many games. Tomb Raider is the only one I really enjoy. But I have to turn the settings right down and even then, towards the end, I’m getting maybe 3fps. It’s just not possible to finish. It seems that Gamers have the right idea. Gaming PCs have more computing power than some governments. That seems to be the way forward.
I’m saving my pennies and I’m looking at an AMD FX 8 core processor, 8GB RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics card. I might actually end up with a better computer than Heidy. Besides being able to render god ray caustics in Carrara in less than a few days, I might actually be able to finish Tomb Raider.