Sunday, February 18, 2007

Goodbye consoles...I love you, but I'm just not in love with you

I took back my Xbox 360 I recently bought. It called me a jerk and asked me why I had been so persistent in engaging in the relationship only to retract my committment once I had sampled the goods. It wasn't an easy decision. Take back one of the most sickest consoles on the market?! "WHAT?" you ask? I debated long and hard about it, but the decision was made based on several factors:
  1. The Xbox 360 is loud. Real loud;
  2. My TV isn't HD-compliant;
  3. To integrate it into my PC domain I'd have to purchase a different sound system that features an auxiliary input;
  4. Console games are more expensive than those for the PC;
  5. I won't be able to play Crysis on the 360.
For these reasons I took it back and pocketed my rather fat refund. To which computer-related purchase do I allocate that money? Fry's had the Seagate 750GB 3.0MB/s SATA II drive on sale for $329. That's cheap...but I don't have that much porn or mp3s to necessitate that much space. More RAM? I have 2GBs. That's good for now.

Most likely, it'll be an 8800 series graphic card. Homer-like drool is pooling in my lap as I think of this big fat sexy card. Directx10 compliant...Crysis...mmmm...768 MBs of DDR3 onboard RAM...384-bit interface...superclocked core running at 626MHz...memory clock at 2000MHz...128 stream processors...dual DVI outputs...HDTV output. I'm almost scared to invest so many primal emotions in it. Am I setting myself up for a let-down? Shhhh...I'll always love you, baby. Always.
Just what are the system requirements for Crysis? According to *sources*, these are them:

Minimum
CPU: Athlon 64 3000+/Intel 2.8ghz
Graphics: Nvidia 6200 or ATI X1300 - Shader Model 2.0
RAM: 768MB on Windows XP or 1GB on Windows Vista
HDD: 6GB
Internet: 256k+
Optical Drive: DVD
Software: DX9.0c with Windows XP

Recommended
CPU: Dual-core CPU
Graphics: Nvidia 7600 or ATI X1600 Pro (SM 3.0) or DX10 equivalent
RAM: 1.5GB+
HDD: 6GB
Internet: 512k+ (128k+ upstream)
Optical Drive: DVD
Software: DX10 with Windows XP

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