I hope everyone had a great Christmas. From the sounds of it most of you did. As for myself, I was celebrating with the in-laws in a three day Festivus marathon. I actually got a bunch of nice stuff. C0D4, Guitar Hero 3 and Assassin’s Creed. I also got numerous giftcards with which I picked up the Bourne Trilogy, the Firefly box set and another 13 month Xbox Live subscription card. Usually I pick those up at online retailers for a discount but I had a WorstBuy gift card that I wasn’t going to use otherwise, so it went towards that. Why people would pay per-month when they can get a card for 1/2 the price is beyond me. I also ordered a few tshirts from Penny Arcade and Jinx.

The big enchilada is that combined birthday and Christmas monitary gifts are enough to afford me the new graphics card I’ve been saving for. I’ll drop $600 at NewEgg some time next week. I’m not in too much of a hurry as component prices typically go down after the holidays. I’m thinking I’m going to go with the 8800GTS series, the 92nm cores, not the bigger ones. Recent benchmarks have put them almost toe-to-toe with their $500 GTX big brothers for half the cost. I’ll also probably need a new power supply to handle the load as well. If there’s anything left over I’ll probably upgrade my aging hard drives or get SATA versions of my optical drives. As much awesome fun as my 360 is bringing, I can’t wait to test drive a new beastly computer. Crysis in 16×12, here I come. 🙂