PC Upgrade Planning: 2006 Edition

Even if you are familiar with PC building, it does not hurt to make sure that you have a handle on what parts you need and a basic strategy of what you are shooting for during the PC building.

Now that it’s officially springtime, our thoughts turn to . . . upgrading our PCs.

That’s not exactly romantic, to be sure, but upgrading your PC system affects your bottom line directly. Plan poorly, and you’re stuck with older technology for longer than you might like. If you’re smart about your upgrade planning, you can extend the life of your existing system or even plan out the life of an entirely new system build.

This year, we’ll see shifts in a number of component landscapes. On the AMD processor front, we’ll see chipset changes as AMD changes its socket format to take advantage of DDR2 memory. The memory roadmap is also evolving, partly because Intel is driving new memory speeds and formats. Meanwhile, Windows Vista will ship this fall, and a new version of Direct3D will initiate a whole new series of GPU wars.

It would be nice if all these changes happened at the same time, but unfortunately, they’re spread out over the year. Let’s take a brief look at upcoming roadmaps for CPUs, memory, chipsets and GPUs. Then we’ll talk about cost-effective ways to plan. Source: ExtremeTech

[tags]memory,amd processor,chipsets,pc upgrade planning,ddr2 memory,cpus,gpus[/tags]