How frequently do you upgrade your PC and graphics card

Boy I'll join ya for sure. 4 XFX cards between 2007-2010, all died within 6 months of each other. They weren't all enthusiast cards and they all ran under 50C in units ranging from media centers to entry level pc's. My 8800 ultra was immediately equipped with a thermalrite cooler and still died, never moving above 60C. *Shakes Fist* I'll never buy anymore of their products

Only XFX cards I bought were couple of 9xxx series Geforce cards, and they are still working. However, I bought eVGA 9600GT card for my PC few years ago, and it went bust in 2 days, then they replaced it, and the replacement card has some more issues (display getting corrupted etc.); so they replaced it with another ... which is working perfectly in my younger brother's system, as his older gfx card died of some 'un-natural causes'. These are the only few incidences when I did not bought an MSI card, luckily, so far, none of their graphic cards I bought have ever failed, even the good old 7600GT still works.

Well Papa,
tomorrow my travels will take me inside the 5 mile MicroCenter radius....so I am stopping in to get a Thermalright silver arrow and Patriot 2000Mhz Ram...see what enthusiast OCD does to you?!

Cheaper than these guys ?
$68 with [H]'s discount.

ummm...well no.

Haha! Guess how much worse I'd be if I were 5,000 miles closer to Newegg and the other U.S. retail/etail outlets.

EDIT: Make that 6,000 miles. I hate having to swim 1,000 miles for consumer electronics

But that would put you in Nashville Tennessee..... ahem...anyway, in the poor house ey?

I'm reasonably sure the swim back would void the warranty.

If you swim 1,000 miles in each direction, will that be a new Guinness book record?

Much like international "yachting", I suspect the swimming records are all held by Vietnamese and Haitians.

I continue to happy to be in a city where Vince Young isn't...no wish to change that.
NZ to Na(s)hville is apparently 8216.9 miles. I'm thankful for that.

I never bothered with Guinness book records, but I decided to be bit less lazy and do a search about it just for argument's sake, and funnily enough the longest distance (ocean) swimming record is held by an Croatian,which is 225 km. It took him about 3 days to achieve this.

I have selected the last option i.e. only upgrade when I really have too. If you spend money on something you don't really have to, you are wasting your hardearned money.

Looking at past history, the 1-3 year cycle option is most accurate for me. I tend to do a full system upgrade every 2-3 years (mainly for gaming), although my LGA775 C2D E6600 just rounded four years recently. I had to replace my 8800GTS 320MB after 2½ years of service, but that was only because it died, otherwise I would have kept it a bit longer.

I wanted to build a Sandy Bridge system ASAP, but then there was the SATA issue with the chipsets. The plan is to put one together very soon though.

E6600 was a very good CPU, I had it for about 2+ years before I swapped it with Q8400, but 'technically' I am not sure it could be called a 'upgrade' except situations where all four cores can be used.

I'm still using a Gigabyte 965P, although the DS4 which is nearly similar to the DS3 I think.

Excellent overclocking board!

My first PC was 8086 (or whatever it was called) with a separate math coprocessor and those big 5 1/4 FDDs, and then a 286, a 386DX (I think 33 Mhz), then a 486DX4-100Mhz, P MMX-166Mhz, P2-300 Mhz, P3-667 Mhz (I think), then a P4-Northwood 2.4Ghz, C2D E6600, and Q8400. The VGAs I went through were TNT, TNT2, Geforce 440MX (or whatever it was), Geforce 4 Ti4200, 9600GT, Radeon HD5770.

On the notebook side, I've gone through few as well, from P4, Pentium M (1GB with some Mobility Radeon with 32MB), C2D P7350 (3GB with 256 MB Geforce 9200GS), and now SNB Q2630 (8GB with 1GB Radeon 6770M).

Frankly I don't exactly remember how much RAM I had over the years, the 286 had I think 1MB, 386 had 4 MB (remember it was pretty damn expensive back then), 486 had 8 MB I think, P1 had 64 MB (I think), P2/3 probably similar as well, P4 had 1GB to start with, but it was upgraded to 2GB later on, C2D had 6GB. C2Q have 4GB (due to only two DIMM slots available on replacement board).

Phew, that was surely a trip down the forgotten memory lane ......