I should have put this up earlier but...I've been playing games a lot (like Team Fortress 2...see below) and going back to test various things.  Anyway, for a slightly early birthday present I picked up a Chaintech 9600GT OC. WOW, I thought it would be nearly twice as fast as my ATI X1950 Pro by some benchmarks that I saw but, it doesn't QUITE work like that.  I mean sure, if you don't have on any anti-aliasing and such, it's twice as fast.  But this card seems to handle anti-aliasing a HELL of a lot better.  Like it went from...Oblivion being playable at 1024x768 and 4xAA with everything on to the same except...at 1600x1200.  In Crysis (thing of beauty that it is) it went from being tolerable at 1024x768 at medium settings with maybe 2xAA to playable at the same resolution, high settings and 8X...or 1600x1200 high settings and 2xAA.  WOW!  I don't know, maybe something's not set right or something but it seems to scale oddly, like the more you throw at it the more efficient it gets.

By the way, if you're playing Oblivion on a fairly beefy graphics card with 512meg or better, I highly recommend Qarl's texture pack 3.  It replaces the standard texture with freaking HUGE textures that look absolutely fantastic.  I'd erased it and was just noticing yesterday how drab everything looked...and that's why.  I'd reinstalled oblivion but not the textures. There's a texture pack for the half-life 2 series also (just FYI) but I can't for the life of me remember what it's called.

Hmmm, other than that, I just picked up an Intel E2200 (1meg cached Core2Duo) for the wife's computer.  It uses a LOT less power under load and with some power saving features the other processor didn't have, I imagine quite a bit more when it's not doing anything.  Picked the 2.2ghz chip because of the PLL on intel chips.  Basically, an 800mhz bus chip won't work at speeds much above 1100 (an artificial limit imposed by the afore mentioned PLL).  By getting a 2.2ghz chip (which really isn't much more than the 1.8) I'm able to get 3ghz out of it on the board that's in her machine.  I also stuck my "old" X1950 Pro in her machine...note to self, set the power saving features to slow that thing down when not used for gaming.

Hmmm, I guess that's about it. 

All I have to do now is reinstall on my machine (don't NEED to, just been meaning to, especially with the new hardware), plug the old X800 in the HTPC, setup the old dual P4 in the "spare" (uses too much power so I'd rather not use it unless necessary) and LAST BUT NOT LEAST...get back to the RAID server thing!   LOL, and I'll get right on that...once I stop goofing around playing games for hours on end. I'm thinking 2009 will be the year ;)