I will tell you why.

Last week I bought some core components for my computer. You see, I have not had a major computer upgrade in about 5 to 7 years. I had my AMD Athalon XP 1.4 GHz and Soyo Dragon Plus die on me a few years back. So I just grabbed a motherboard and processor that I had laying around the house. It was an Intel 2.2 GHz and an Intel motherboard.

Other than that I have just been changing out the video cards to make sure that I can continue playing the games that I wanted. During this time I bought an Xbox, and my brother and friends got together and bought me a Xbox 360 when Halo3 came out.

This means that I have not been a PC gamer in a long time. Partly because I have just not found any interest in PC gaming now that I no longer play EverQuest. Partly because my hardware just couldn’t keep up all of the time. Partly because I switch to Linux about 2.5 years ago.

Now I love Linux, but there is little support for gaming. Wine, Cedega, and Codeweavers do a great job at making Microsoft based programs, games is what I mainly use them for. Now I’m not going to go into all of the ways, and what it takes for Wine and the rest to do what they do, but they do a wonderful job.

So about the PC. I looked around and thought about this for a long time. Visited several websites and stores to try and get the best deal. Below is what I bought and yes, it is an AMD build. Really one video card away from having a Spider platform, but I guess it is a Spider platform anyway, just without Crossfire.

The Spider:
K9A2 Platinum 790FX AM2+ ATX Motherboard
Radeon HD 3870 512MB GDDR4 PCIe Graphics Card
AMD® Boxed Phenom X4 Quad-Core Black Edition Processor 9850
XMS2 2GB PC-8500 DDR2 Memory Kit

So there you have my Spider build. AMD’s new platform PC.

I think that I will dual boot Windows XP and Linux. I will just set it up for gaming on the XP side. The main reason for this the that there is just not enough ATI Radeon 3D support in the Linux drivers yet. I guess you could say that the Linux community is lucky to have what we have. I’m thankful that there is some 3D support. I’m sure that AMD will get on the ball and get more and more native support for Linux soon enough.

As for the speed. Lighting fast. A true Quad core CPU. I know all the Intel lovers will spout at me about my processor can beat your processor. The latest AMD CPU, 790FX Northbridge chipset, and Video GPU, all from AMD working together the way that were meant to be, might pull more weight that a setup of Intel CPU, VIA Northbridge, and nVidia GPU, or any other way you want to spin it.

For right now I feel that the Spider platform was the way to go. I’m sure that it will serve me well into the future.