All Gigged Up and Nowhere To Go...

This is frustrating. Over the last 2 weeks, I have been trying to get a hold of an Athlon 64 processor for my upgrade. There aren't any. Boards they have a lot of, but no AM2 Athlons. The first time I went around, I got a sense of what I could buy. I was looking for one of those energy efficient Semprons that run on 35W. They did not have any on stock. They had the regular ones. For each of the 2 shops I went to, they had one piece each of a Sempron 3000+ (with 256 L2 cache) and a Sempron 3200+ (with a 128 L2 cache). Both crunched numbers at a whopping 62W, same as the Athlon 64's. So thinking I wouldn't be saving on the power consumption, I decided to go with an Athlon 3000+, which had double the L2 cache of the Sempron 3000+ and built-in support for virtualization. Alas, none can be found. Shop owner 1 promised he'd have one delivered to him last Friday, but I went there and he said there was a delay since the distributors called an early holiday for their employees. Shop owner 2 on the other was a bit more chatty so I went ahead and explained my predicament, saying I needed an enery efficient Sempron with the Athlon as a second choice. He was very afront about AMD though. He apologized (he must've sensed I was an AMD fanboy by the way I threw around all those acronyms) and said that "to be honest, disadvantage po sa amin ang mag-stock ng AMD kase hindi steady ang upgrade plans nila, 'di tulad ng Intel na iisa lang ang socket para sa last-generation 32-bit hangang sa mga dual-core na 64-bit." Sadly, he has a point.

So, where am I today? I bought a Gig of RAM from shop owner 2. They sold me a Kingston KVR533D2N4 stick for only 5,100. Great price! Unfortunately, its the only piece I have. I really do not want to go the Intel way (a matter of presonal preference). However, if I don't get anywhere in the next week or so, I'll be forced to look at an Intel proc and motherboard just to see what my options are. Budget-wise though, an AMD is my best option.

Foot In The Door

I've been meaning to get an upgrade going this year but that had to take a backseat because of the construction work we had to do on our recently acquired house. By a fortunate twist of events a few of my friends are in need Socket A parts that I have in my machine. One officemate was convincing me to sell my motherboard to him, as his Asus motherboard just kicked the bucket. Another friend is asking for my processor and RAM so he can finally get his aging Duron system a boost.

I've been mulling over gutting my machine and doing what I call a foot-in-the-door upgrade. See with quadcore chips just barely out the door, the prices of 64-bit single core chips have gone down that the slowest Athlon 64 is now at a price point where its equal to the money I forked out for my Sempron 2400+ some 2 1/2 years ago. If I buy an AM2 board, my upgrade path is secure. I get the parts I need at a not-so-premium price and I can upgrade to dual-core several months after and quadcore further down the road.

If I sell my parts, I'll probably raise around 5,000 pesos. Now to get a Gigabyte Socket AM2 board with integrated graphics (I'm no gamer anyway), an Athlon 64 3000+ and a Gig of DDR2 memory I'd have to raise 13,000. I've already sold a Palm handheld I've been holding on to just to get a little bit more cash, but I don't think I can get more to get this upgrade going. I'm already looking at other options, like selling my phone cheap. I have around 20 comic books gathering dust in my closet that I don't know the value of. I was told some of them were rare ones. I've asked another officemate I'd give him any one of the titles if he sells the rest. Rumaging the closest yielded no other items that I could sell though. ~sigh

I'm still undecided at this point.