6) Audigy 2 - It's last because of issues I had (read my
thread), but I will grudgingly admit that when it's running, it does sound better than my Turtle Beach Montego II. Though that's not saying much...
5) 435W Enermax Whisper Series with Active PFC and manually adjustable fan speed. Seriously kicks a$$. Would be higher, but like someone said before, it's hard to tell the difference. All I know was that it was necessary to run my 5th hard drive (next on the list).
4) WD 800JB. Good lord this hard drive rulez. I now have 300GB of space; 2 Maxtors and 3 WD's. I'll continue to add WD's in the future, but not until Serial ATA.
3) AXP 1900+ from a PII 450. Yeah, it's a big jump, but I barely noticed it. I don't play enough FPS' to have really strained my old PII. However, I did notice a big difference in RTCW. The thing is, I didn't play it much after upgrading so it didn't factor in much. Now if I had still had my PII system now and had been trying to play Age of Mythology... well, I can imagine I'd realize how wonderful the change truly was.
2) Case with 5 cooling fans. The previous 4 hard drives were just kind of laying in the case with the side off. Getting a cheap case (I will wait to buy a Lian-Li until I get a computer worthy of one...) with 5 fan slots wasn't bad. It also had room for all 5 hard drive and had a removable (not slide-out, but removable) motherboard tray as well. I'll never go back to not having one of those!
1) 3mbps cable modem service. When I started college in the dorms, I was sharing a T1 line at 1.5mbps. When I moved out, I swore I wouldn't bother with anything slower. I finally broke down and paid the money ($50/month for the first three months; cancelled after that) for a 1.5mbps DSL line that I only kept through the promotional period. When I said broke down, you didn't think I'd actually go back to dial-up, did you? Good lord that's insane! Let me tell you, if you don't think that it would make much of a difference moving from 1.5mbps to 3mbps (actually tests consitently at 3.3mbps), then you're sadly mistaken. I consistently fill my entire bandwidth. It's the price I pay....
I probably won't be upgrading again until Hammer. I wouldn't have upgraded my proc at all when I did had it not been for a sweet deal on the mobo/CPU combo ($100 total back in October). I plan on getting 5 hard drives (in a RAID 5 array) of about 120GB apiece, depending on prices at the time, an NV 30 (or 31, also depending on pricing and availability), possibly a speaker upgrade (my current Altec Lansings sure as hell don't
sound 4 years old), and very possibly a monitor upgrade, as my power button on my Dell P990 19" Trinitron is going out. Which one you ask? Well, if FFD comes out EVER from NEC or Mitsubishi, I'll be looking at models with that, but for now, the front-runner would be
this Hitachi CML174B, with a
rise and fall response time of 12ms and 4ms, respectively. Hopefully, by then there will be an 18.1" version. I can dream, can't I?