Upgrade time

I've been trying to justify a computer upgrade for months to myself and just can't do it. The Gigabyte GA-2CEWH and Supermicro H8DCi look like exactly what I want, but the price (~$350-400) and the fact I'd need a new video card (~$300+) is a bit of a turnoff. I'm also very interested to see the Tyan K8HM in action. The Broadcom HT1000/2000 combo looks like it runs cooler than the NF 2200/2050 and Broadcom's implementations of PCI-X and RAID look solid as well. SLI/Crossfire support looks unlikely, but my fingers are crossed anyway.
My Opteron 150 @ 2.6GHz (and SK8N) are still rock solid, so I've decided to replace the video card insetad. My fanless Gigabyte 6800 has been working well for the last couple years, but is starting to show its age with newer games (read: Oblivion). I'm biting the bullet and getting a 7800GS. I was a bit torn because the X850XT works great with Oblivion, but the 7800GS edges it out in features. Normally I wait longer for an upgrade like this, but I found a buyer for my old card and did a little calculation to justify it to myself. :)

	7800GS	6800
GPU Clockspeed	430MHz	325MHz
Pixel pipelines	16 pipes	12 pipes
clock*pipes='GPU score'	6880 points	3900 points
7800GS GPU is nominally 76% faster
RAM Clockspeed	1300MHz	700MHz
7800GS RAM is 85% faster

Of course these numbers about as useful as a 3DMark score (not much), but Oblivion is so GPU intensive that I expect to see a big improvement in minimum framerates and hopefully around a 50% overall speedup. I'm also curious how the 256MB RAM will improve the situation as well. I run most games at 1024x768 (the sweet spot for my 17" monitor), so I don't think I'm running into framebuffer size issues, but every bit helps with such a texture-intensive game.

I really like having a fanless card. The Gigabyte I have now has an interesting heatsink setup where there's a large plate on the front side attached by 2 heatpipes to an even larger, thicker 'sink on the back. The card always gets hot under load, but still cool enough to touch. I never had much success overclocking it, but airflow in my case isn't so hot (so to speak), and 80 degree ambient temps these days don't help much either. The new card has a single-slot PWM blower like the original 7800GTX. I have my fingers crossed it'll be quiet, but I have a gut feeling that it'll be BIOS-set to be pretty fast thanks to its 55MHz factory overclock. Sadly, neither Zalman nor Arctic Cooling make big, quiet replacement fans. Gainward rigged an AC-looking cooler on their top-end 7800GS+ so maybe something similar with trickle into the market.

UPS tells me it should be here tomorrow. Can't wait!