How often do you upgrade your PC these days?

[yhelothar]

I found that upgrading can be pretty darn cost efficient if you buy bang for the buck items that retain their value well, and selling old parts.
Just takes a lot of time and research though. I stopped doing that a while ago. I currently upgrade the main parts(CPU,VGA,RAM,HDD) about every two years.

 

[Kadarin]

I do every couple of years or so. Right now I'm thinking of doing one of two things: Throwing together a Core2Duo system to run Gentoo, or buying a Mac Pro. Somehow, I think the Gentoo system would be more rewarding.

 

[IGBT]

..it's been a few years. I wana build a conroe box. mabe in january.

 

[Excelsior]

I'll probably end up getting a new "core" to this system (CPU/MB/RAM/VID) in a year or so.

 

[quakefiend420]

not very often

i went

cyrix 133-->p3 450--->athlon 550--->athlon xp 1800--->barton mobile 2500--->P4 2.8 DC eventually i'll go to a c2d when i need the extra speed...and i'll slap another 7900gt inthis rig if i need that

video cards went from a tnt 16mb pci all the way up to the 7900gt i have now

 

[brtspears2]

During college, too much. Had too much time on my hands to research parts, overclockable parts, which chip to pick. Now it is all down to a working computer. What I have works fine.

P200 MMX -> P3-500 -> C533 Coppermine o/c to 800 -> P3-933 -> AMD T-bird 1GHz o/c to 1.4 -> XP 1600+ o/c to XP 2100+ -> P4-3.0E Prescott (one heck of a space heater).
Matrox Mystique -> Voodoo 3 3500 -> Radeon 7500 AIW -> Radeon 9600 AIW -> Geforce 6800GT + ATI TV Elite (2x)

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

Most of my rig has been the same for over 2 years. I had to swap the MSI board out cos that died, replaced it with a DFI. Added another 1GB stick and HD a year ago. I'll be upgrading before the summer cos games are starting to suck.

 

[BillyBatson]

when i was in the military i updated ever 4 months. now that i am out, aren't working, and going to school it has been 22 months since i bought anything new and in that time i actually sold my high end ram and purchased some value ram

 

[NinjaGnome]

I upgrade when I cant play my games at 1680x1050 (native res) with settings on high.
I upgraded a little for BF 2142, went from x800xl to 7900gs (free upgrade) and 1 gig to 2 gigs of ram. I think ill wait next time to see if the game is good before i upgrade. Wow plays real nice on this upgraded machine though. Max AA/AF and all settings max.

 

[z0mb13]

my last computer lasted 4 years.

 

[rudder]

not for a while. I am now up to a E6300, 2 gigs ram, and a 7800GT. I did this so I can play f.e.a.r. and oblivion. I haven't had time to do more than play 20 minutes of DoD at a time, which I could have easily down with last years hardware.

 

[meltdown75]

The last time I upgraded was when I joined this board in Nov. 2004.

Still rockin the Athlon 2700 and the Radeon 9600. :/

Haven't ran into any problems running games yet or reached "critical upgrade status". It runs Madden & NHL 07 perfect and that's all I need for now.

 

[The Green Bean]

Originally posted by: HamburgerBoy
After five years I finally upgraded a couple of days ago.

1.4Ghz Thunderbird to a 3800+ A64 X2
9200 Pro to a 7900 GT
512MB PC2100 to 1GB PC6400
40GB 2MB Cache HDD to 160GB 8MB Cache HDD

Still not quite as uber as what you guys have, but for me it's ****** godly.

How did that get past te censor?

 

[child of wonder]

Here's the upgrade life of my gaming PC.

1997 - IBM Aptiva, Cyrix 133MHz, 16MB RAM, 2GB HDD
2001 - Dell Dimension 8200, Pentium 4 2.0GHz, 512MB RDRAM, 80GB HDD
(start building my own PCs here)
Feb 2004 - AMD Athlon XP 2600+, 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD, ATI 9700 Pro
Sept 2004 - AMD Athlon XP 3200+, 1024MB RAM, 200GB HDD, Nvidia 6800GT
Sept 2005 - AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 1024MB RAM, 200GB HDD, Nvidia 7800GTX
April 2006 - AMD Opteron 146 (OCed to 2.4GHz), 2GB RAM, 2x250GB HDD RAID 0, Nvidia 7900GT
August 2006 - AMD Opteron 170 (OCed to 2.4GHz), 2GB RAM, 2x250GB HDD RAID 0, ATI X1900XT (OCed to XTX)
Yesterday - Intel Core 2 Duo e6600 (OCed to 3.0GHz and climbing), 2GB DDR2 800, 2x250GB HDD RAID 0, ATI X1900XT (OCed to XTX)

 

[Juno]

my sequence:

'96 - pentium 133mhz
'99 - amd k-6 350mhz
'03 - amd athlon xp 2700+
'06 - amd athlon x2 3800+

 

[pontifex]

not as often as i used to.

i don't think i'll upgrade for awhile yet.

 

[Ushio]

Used to do it every year when I was more into gaming

haven't upgraded now for a while now and see no reason to yet, still going strong with athlon 3000 and 6600GT

 

[Kaido]

Used to do it every 6 months to a year, with various part upgrades inbetween. Now I just use a Core 2 Duo laptop and have a homemade docking station with a big LCD. I use a TiVo & Xbox in my home theater, so that's pretty much all set. I'm pretty happy with my current tech setup so far.

My current upgrade system is putting $20 a week into an ING account (harder to spend that way!), then withdrawing it every 2 years (ends up being $2,000 + interest) to blow on a new computer or file server or whatever I want at the time. $20 a week is easy; $2k at one time is not, unless I've been saving it up for awhile I think my next purchase will be a big, fat file server to store multimedia, backups, and client data.

 

[j00fek]

every 3-5years. no need for the best every 6mos like most people

 

[slpaulson]

I usually upgrade my cpu/motherboard/memory one year, and video card the next. Then I repeat the cycle.

 

[ggnl]

I did a minor upgrade (new vid card and more ram) a couple months ago for the first time in 3 years. It ended up being mostly a waste of money since I've done virtually no gaming on it since then.

I still want to build a good gaming rig but I've got too many other things to spend money on right now.

 

[SparkyJJO]

When money allows, but usually about a year before something big. I recently got a dual core opteron to replace my 3700+ I bought back in april though, but an upgrade like that isn't normal.

Longest I went was for two years with my 9800 pro, that was a good card. Had a s754 3000+ for a little over a year of that time, the rest was with a mobile 2400+