As time moved on, the games became quickly more and more demanding. Consequentially, I decided not to upgrade my rig, but buy a whole new system. I consulted JCM Concepts, and they provided me with the original configuration of this machine: Sakura was born. Providing dual-core, it was sure to be one of the better rigs at the time. The original setup had 2 GB RAM on board, a Maxtor 250 GB SATA HD, and an ATI Radeon X850. Pricy at the time, but very much worthwhile. As for OS, I was bold enough to move onto Windows XP x64 Edition.

The downside of early birds is the trouble of not everything fully supported. Such was the case with 64-bit computing, which lacked some driver capabilities. As a result, I had to dual-boot with a 32-bit Windows to do the things I could not with 64-bit. Moreover, there was a nasty performance issue with the 64-bit driver of the nForce 4 chipset of my motherboard. It took a few months before that one was solved. And on another note, the dual-core of AMD was great for systems that were multi-core aware. A lot of games at that time did not have this, and so no performance gain. Moreover, the painful problem of TSC drift really put a cork on the fun. Luckily, AMD released a fix for that later on. It wasn't until 6 months after purchase that the system was running at a normal pace and without too many quirks.

With the release of resource hog The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I traded up my X850 for a water-cooled ATI Radeon X1950XT. The trade-up was remarkable in both comfort (almost no sound) and performance. But the success was short-lived: a little over 6 months later, the cooler sprung a leak. Fortunately, I was able to get a shiny new nVidia GeForce 8800GTX (by ASUS) for around 80 euros (thanks to the clever manoeuvring of the hardware guy at JCM Concepts) at the suppliers. Naturally, the 8800GTX was a whole lot better, but was not water-cooled and therefore a bit more noisy.

Due to memory problems, and the fact that the TSC drift of AMD was sometimes a hassle on earlier linux kernels as well, I decided to upgrade my CPU, RAM (not that I had a choice there, as the original was broken), and MOBO.

The original Sakura configuration received new RAM (apparently, it was still covered by warranty), and got relocated to Ayanami's case, and is now servicing as a computer at work. Meanwhile, the Antec Sonata case of Sakura became host to another Sakura; I never really have changed its name, but for the sake of ease on this site, I stick to Sakura II.