A slight pulsing glint of ruby started in one of her eyes to the beat of every syllable of her words.

And it was for the first time in my existence that I started to hate her for those words; just genuinely hate her.

There is so much more to add to that list but it’s definitely constantly about going around and meeting objectives that allows you to really feel that the pacing of the game is accelerating to a particular direction and manner where you don’t feel like you’re just mining through a game needlessly or mindlessly. The sense of purpose is the drive of the game along with exploration. So what then of the main quest of the game? Well it turns out from what many tell me is that the main quest is….not very interesting. And given the descriptions of how many have played the game before me, the best way to play oblivion – and Skyrim if you happen to be playing that game as well – is to allow detours to “happen” along the way. It’s sort of like doing what happenes in Lord of the Rings, where you have your starting party and you think that the story is going to continue in the particular pace and direction when suddenly something happens or a decision is made where your character ends up following a great detour or a set or two of detours. And all of this may seem, when observed in detail, as isolated obstructions, but then allow you to witness the building of the character(s). Which then all comes together once you come back to the “main course”, if you will, and you then realize that all the trails and detours really helped put a zest to the main quest overall – from start to finish.

And that was probably the reason why I did played the game initially as I did: I did not consider in taking deliberate long detours.

So it’s why now, with GUNGHO917 – who is just starting to play Oblivion – I’m advising to take as many detours as possible before continuing onward and to grow his character as much as possible before ending up finishing the main quest. And there are benefits to it which will later make the challenges brought on by the main quest seem insignificant I’m sure. So it’s best for anyone that is playing either Oblivion, or Skyrim, or any possible future Elder Scrolls title in going about. But now….about myself.

All about the Gold

So since I have already finished the main quest, and subsequently closed myself out from being able to loot within places of Oblivion with the total elimination of oblivion portals, I’ve now come to end up looting ruins, caves, forts, and mines. Not exactly the most satisfying of places to go to all the time (especially true if all these places happen to be nothing more than level design remixes that were made by the very same level designer) with some few among these categories being a considerable exception. So right now the whole entire time now is dedicated to essentially tomb/mine/fort/ruin raiding. But what would be the point aside of leveling up combat attributes of my character? Well it’s really just all about the looting and then selling off items found for various prices while fooling around with the haggle slide bar.

The other thing is that, while going around the entire map and exploring new places to pillage, I collect enchanted items and weapons to which, at some point, I’ll end up selling off (although this is unlikely) while buy just about every little piece of real estate I can get along with their respective upgrades. And all for following the dumb rule: whoever stops playing with all the in-game toys wins.

No but seriously though, it’s a bit fun sometimes to find some considerable amount of resellable loot (especially heavy armor) and then just spend on tools instead of very expensive services to repair, recharge, enchant your items of daily use. After a while you’ll be filthy rich and with more money than you could ever bother with spending or looting for. There are a few people that will try to complete all quests, buy all the houses, collect all the enchanted weapons they can get, hoard as much of particular weapons os possible and mod their game to the max. I…well…I just want to finish the quests and get on with the next massive title.

Stay tuned for the next installment on this subject!

In the last two years since putting together SSM1, I’ve upgraded the video graphics card: first started the build off with a Nvidia GTX 260, followed by a year later with an upgrade to a GTX 460, and then a year later with the current GTX 570. Each card as relatively set me back a bit during the time that they were purchased, I’ve learned that for upgrading something important like a video graphics card, it’s best to go back to budgeting and planning ahead…sort of.

Not to say that I’ve spent the money on the hardware on a mere whim as each upgrade addressed a two problems that the GTX 260 had in my build: heat and power consumption. The GTX 260 was a good card…for something as back as 2006 (which really did not make sense to buy in 2009 if you think about it). So the power consumption and heat dissipation were things that I was not entirely a fan of so the GTX 460 upgrade addressed that quickly. And the GTX 570 later on addressed the issue of providing the same power consumption levels but with more processing power than the GTX 460. In other words I get the double the power and then some with just one single card replacement – a pretty sweet trade-off.

But when going on to looking for an overall system overhaul, you have to seriously consider – as I’ve pointed out in my ongoing slow DIY PC guide articles – in planning ahead. With the latest Intel releases of LGA 1155, and now more recently LGA 2011 which replaces the LGA 1366 CPU line for the top-tier platform spot, it’s time to go back to do some research. The reason to do research now in contrast to a year and a half ago when LGA 1155 CPUs came out is simply because the options found at the top-tier of Intel CPUs is where most of the interesting innovations are put into by Intel and it’s usually going to be something very good for the money’s worth (sometimes). Then again, given that Haswell will take some features that will come from the upcoming Ivy Bridge – which is a revised version of Sandy Bridge, it makes sense then to do research now in order to gain insight to what will likely be in store later on and start preparing a budget ahead of time significantly.
Sure developments may change: I could just sack the entire project in favor of a smaller and cheaper one (like building a home network server for various network applications or building a small micro-ATX solution for practice and yuks). And then of course could be in me breaking my own original plan and just upgrade my system a tad (particularly in storage and graphics along with the purchase of two more monitors, a new desk and monitor mounting fixtures).

But enough of that, here’s the ideal hardware specification that I would get for SSM2 (mind you there are some borrowing from the SSM1 build).

• The Case
  • USB 3.0 Support
  • Able to have six 120mm fans in direct front, bottom, top and rear. All Scythe running at 3000 RPM.
  • Anodized Black exterior and interior paint finish
  • Case can hold six HDDs (or SSDs) with very good ventilation for them
  • Can support E-ATX – in particular SEEC sized motherboard such as the ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer
• The Motherboard
  • USB 3.0 and lots of them
  • 7 PCIe 3.0 x16 lanes
  • 6 or more SATA 6Gb/s HDD/SSD support
  • 2 SATA 3GB/s Controller
  • 32 GB DDR3 RAM support (1600 speed or better)
  • Haswell CPU support
  • Two RJ-45 controllers and adapters
  • 64GB DDR4 support
• The Storage
  • 5 4TB SATA 6Gb/s HDDs (or SSDs)
  • 1 2TB SATA 6Gb/s SSD (boot drive)
• The Optical Drives
  • 2 x Blu-Ray Double-Side Re-Writable Optical Drives (Samsung? Sony?) with SATA 6Gb/s connection
• The Central Processing Unit
  • Intel Haswell or Ivy Bridge architecture-based CPU (hexa or quad core model)
• The Graphics Solution
  • 2 x Nvidia GTX 570 (for triple screen outputting) in Sli*
• The Sound Card
  • HT Omega eClaro Sound Card*
• The Memory
  • 12 GB of DDR3 1666 Mushkin Redline**

Usually this is where most people window shop, make a list, and then sum up the grand total (subtotal + applicable taxes + shipping and handling + misc costs for purchase). But this usually ends up being a waste of time, or rather, the time that could have been allocated to carefully check the parts and price is now shifted to the time now used to “restart” the window shopping, listing, and re summing the grand total again. In other words: if you simply have a list of parts that you would like to buy without the researching the prices and taking a second look at comparable products of similar or same performance, purchase costs, cost of purchase from particular retailer, then costs could go quickly up past the initial estimated budget cost as you purchase your parts as you go along.

The reason that it’s best to take this more cautious approach in budgeting/researching is that, although it’s true that new parts come out quarterly throughout a year – sometimes the software industry being ahead of the hardware industry when it comes to new product release cycles – you’ll be able to get a more clear idea of what’s looking like in the market for the products with whatever features you’re looking for in particular.

The best tool to use when budgeting cost for a project is a spread sheet. If you’re familiar with using spreadsheets, then you can style your spreadsheet after the one that I have as an example following, re-arrange it entirely, or – if you are really good and familiar with spreadsheets, make your own modeled after the one I have for example.

Reasons I recommend a spreadsheet is because spreadsheets can be set up to automatically calculate the sum of subtotals, taxes, estimated shipping and handling costs and allow you to organize items in the manner that best suits for you to visually see what you have in your project list. Making charts is really an option as the numerical figures and sums should give you enough idea as to where the cost of the parts has in total – Although it does not hurt to have visual cues to understand what components are going to take up how much of your budget.

This would also make the whole research aspect easy as you can create individual books within one spreadsheet that have the different possible build configurations that you can possibly want and the different costs of each without having to resort to making different lists (written or in a typed text file) all the time.

The listing of categories should go by name of product, quantity, subtotal, taxes (for the individual product), shipping and handling, and grand total. Each item row is going to have the aforementioned categories listed in that order. After all the items have been listed, as you’ll see in my example that you can download, you’ll notice that there’s a column of grand totals for each of the individual prices. This should allow you to easily select the grand totals and sum them. Also it’s wise to have the sub totals, taxes, shipping and handling, all categorically summed up and presented before the grand total so as you can have a clear idea where the costs are coming from where. It could sometimes be the shipping and handling and/or taxes of certain items that can raise the cost of your project between 10% to 25% on average. So it’s best to have these different costs that go along with each item to be categorically listed and summed for analyzing what you want to do.

Low, mid, and high range P.C. build project costs.

Usually when a new piece of hardware is introduced into the market, such as faster central processing unit, a storage device of larger capacity and speed, the hardware considered “high-end” of last year has it’s price cut down or have it’s priced slightly lowered and then slowly or quickly disappear from the market. When this “old” hardware model is replaced with a new model, this hardware becomes “mainstream” in terms of cost because, due to it’s pricing, becoming more accessible than it was prior to most consumers that once wanted it but could not afford it. So it trickles down to the point where a low cost budget system can be built at half the cost of what it would a year or two ago.

High end systems are usually where the phrase “the sky is the limit” rings true. If you have the money, you can buy anything to build your dream machine. But the thing with high-end systems is that they are typically not good at deprecating when comparing to the initial cost of the entire set of components making up the entire system. This is, again, caused by the release of new model hardware components that usually cause prices for the parts end up deprecating sometimes steeply. So when this happens, this typically ends up making any means of potentially selling off individual components for upgrades or the entire system build, to be impossible to be done on the initial cost price for building. But the great thing about high end systems, especially if you’ve done a thorough job at checking at the entire line of hardware that will go into it and have estimated the particular parts that you’ll buy to expand or periodically at will, you can end up with a system that in the long run, is not as valuable (if you look at the prices of the individual parts making up the build), but has longevity to be of constant use to you as the user for a long period of time and not require much maintenance or run frequently with hitting a particular performance ceiling. Note that “future-proofing” is impossible and that your high-end system will, in due time, will at some point need to be replaced by a newer and more nimbler system build. So the best advice for people that intend on building high-end systems that they’ll want to keep for a long time is to save money on the side for the next high-end build so that way, hopefully, your budget will be larger and you can build a system that will last your periodically longer than your current one did. Of course this is theoretical and is subject to how the user feels and/or has researched as to where his or her system build compares to other average systems of present in terms of running the latest current software.

And because this is a continual process of hardware replacing hardware from certain price ranges, what constitutes as a “low-end”, “midrange”, or “high-end” PC varies from time to time. So research in finding what price ranges of total cost constitutes to being any of the three categories must be done prior to looking around for parts. Usually, most people who build their systems go with building mid-range system. This is because many components that are targeted for mid-range computers are usually about getting “the most bang for the buck”. And also assumes that you’ll be following what most PC builders will use as far as software is concerned (gaming, video and audio editing and encoding, programming, etc). So you’ll sometimes find some hardware, such as a graphics card, that has almost all the features of a high end graphics card model with the difference being the overall speed and memory it has (where real world performance is just as good as the high end graphics card in respect to general performance). And also remember: it all comes back to what you want out of your computer in respect to what you will be doing frequently with it and also how long you’ll be expecting to keep your particular build.

“Low end” computer builds are usually with the intention of specific particular use, such as a home media center, a network terminal, or for basic office/scholastic needs. These systems are cheap to build and are financially easy projects to get done quickly. If the research for the hardware to be used is done right, you can build a low end system which can be easily upgraded later with more performance components such as faster RAM, graphics card, and central processing unit which will make the longevity of that budget system go beyond just the supposed intended time of use. The only thing to be aware of course is that, if your components are going to be comprised of cheap end parts, expect performance for things beyond what your system was intended to do (such as gaming) are going to result hitting a performance ceiling no matter what upgrades you do. It would be a good idea to invest on a mid-range ATX motherboard with a performance oriented chipset that will allow for the better use of hardware upgrades in the future than going with a micro or pico – ATX motherboard where chipsets are going to severely limit your systems overall performance.

And that’s it for the abstracts for budgeting for a PC. Here’s my example of a spreadsheet I developed for my build. If you want to modify or arrange your own spreadsheet and use this as a template for your own spreadsheet calculator, by all means go ahead.

The spreadsheet comes in both Open Document Spreadsheet and Microsoft Excel formats.

• Sonokamome’s Hardware Spreadsheet Calculator Version 2.0 (.ods)
• Sonokamome’s Hardware Spreadsheet Calculator Version 2.0 (.xsl)

I will be updating my spreadsheet calculator from time to time and I’ll have a section for it on my site. Enjoy!