Supreme Commander just pushed my 2004 gaming PC over the edge. After a day of royally stressing it, and many game crashes as the motherboard beeps like crazy (overheating warnings, I assume), it will no longer POST. Something died.

It’s probably the video card. It could also be the motherboard, since I can’t even get the Abit diagnostic LED to show a “missing video card” status code when it’s absent. It might also be the CPU or its heatsink, but that’s unlikely, since this computer was frequently used for overnight video encoding (100% CPU usage for 6-12 hours) and never had a problem with it.

I could fix it. I could buy a new video card for $139 that’s far better than my 6600GT that may have just died. But this PC was one of the worst purchases I ever made. I essentially spent $1100 for:

• 2 months of Half-Life 2
• 3 years of downloading TV shows (and Linux ISOs, of course)
• 2 weeks of Supreme Commander

I absolutely love PC gaming… occasionally. But I hate PCs. I hate Windows, drivers, and crappy/buggy hardware. And I do everything, except downloads and gaming, on a Mac. I have absolutely no desire to switch back to Windows.

Therefore, I refuse to put any more money into this PC. I’ll save 3 of the 4 hard drives and sell the rest of the parts for a few hundred bucks (if I’m lucky).

And I’ll replace it with a desktop Mac. I don’t know which one yet, since I want to see what Tuesday’s update does to the iMac lineup, but I’ll probably still want a Mac Pro.

Goodbye, 3.4 GHz Of Love.