MisterQuade (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} mrq) wrote,@ 2006-08-21 08:44:00 |
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Greetings from the other side!
Ok, 2 weeks gone with no update till now. What's up?
Better ask, what's down... And that was my PC. Once again it decided to make a spectacular nosedive down lockup canyon. Harddisk again it seemed. Every since I went serial ATA things have not been quite right. A very infrequent pause on harddisk access would sometimes corrupt the registry forcing me to reformat and start over. The third time was enough for me and I left the thing off for a week while I aquired a new motherboard (I suspect the disk itself was ok, and that the motherboard SATA controller was to blame). I really have had it up to here *gestures upwards* with every Athlon64 motherboard I have gotten for that chip and decided that enough was enough.
Anyway, as of now I am back to a functional work platform to be able to make posts again, so here I am.
There were a few setbacks, and a couple yet to tackle though. Firstly was that they don't make motherboards for my old CPU anymore. They also don't make motherboards that are compatible with my old RAM, or graphics card.....ow, this is expensive sounding.
The final list of parts is as follows.
Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 (2.4GHz Dual Core) CPU
Intel 965LT Motherboard (Bare Bones full ATX)
2Gb OCZ DDR2800 RAM 5-5-5-10
XFX 7900GT VIVO Graphics (520MHz/1.5GHz)
You can picture my excitement!
Cept the CPU's are impossible to come by in Australia at the moment. After a week, I found a shop in Melbourne who had a few left and had it shipped over to join the rest of the parts acquired that previous weekend from local shops and other online places.
Cept it kept crashing befor ei could install Windows. Hmm. LOTS of experimentation with pulling bits out and trying RAM combos pointed me towards it either being a RAM or a power issue. The new MB was an ATXV2.2 board with a 24 pin power connector rather than the 20 pin one on my old power supply. Damn...the manual said that I could use the old type of power supply with it and just ignore the pins. Hmmmmmm.
Went out and bought a new up-to-date Power supply just to be sure, and the cheapest stick of RAM I could find.
Antec HENeo 500W modular Power Supply
512Mb Veritech (wee) DDR2533 RAM
Swapping in the RAM and BINGO, all systems are go. Havent had an issue since. Power Supply is just a bonus, but I install it anyway, if only for a cable management and future stability reason. Its rated at 50W less than my old one, but that will make a nice spare in any case.
So at the moment, I have all my core applications and games loaded after a weekend of furious installation. I am limping along on 512Mb of RAM, but will arange for exchanges with WORKING stuff today...unfortunately the shop is in Sydney.
When I get working stuff I will try to offload the spare RAM somewhere. Anyone in need of a cheap stick of DDR2?
Oh, btw. Even hampered by low and underspeed RAM as it is atm, it is FAST.
Running SuperPi and calculating Pi to 8 million decimal places can be done on a single core in 4 minutes 48 seconds. My old 2Ghz Athlon 64 managed the same feat in 7 minutes 33 seconds when spectacularly overclocked, and about 10 seconds slower again when in day-to-day mode. To think that there an entire other CPU waiting idly in the wings makes me positively *image censored*.
Ok, 2 weeks gone with no update till now. What's up?
Better ask, what's down... And that was my PC. Once again it decided to make a spectacular nosedive down lockup canyon. Harddisk again it seemed. Every since I went serial ATA things have not been quite right. A very infrequent pause on harddisk access would sometimes corrupt the registry forcing me to reformat and start over. The third time was enough for me and I left the thing off for a week while I aquired a new motherboard (I suspect the disk itself was ok, and that the motherboard SATA controller was to blame). I really have had it up to here *gestures upwards* with every Athlon64 motherboard I have gotten for that chip and decided that enough was enough.
Anyway, as of now I am back to a functional work platform to be able to make posts again, so here I am.
There were a few setbacks, and a couple yet to tackle though. Firstly was that they don't make motherboards for my old CPU anymore. They also don't make motherboards that are compatible with my old RAM, or graphics card.....ow, this is expensive sounding.
The final list of parts is as follows.
Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 (2.4GHz Dual Core) CPU
Intel 965LT Motherboard (Bare Bones full ATX)
2Gb OCZ DDR2800 RAM 5-5-5-10
XFX 7900GT VIVO Graphics (520MHz/1.5GHz)
You can picture my excitement!
Cept the CPU's are impossible to come by in Australia at the moment. After a week, I found a shop in Melbourne who had a few left and had it shipped over to join the rest of the parts acquired that previous weekend from local shops and other online places.
Cept it kept crashing befor ei could install Windows. Hmm. LOTS of experimentation with pulling bits out and trying RAM combos pointed me towards it either being a RAM or a power issue. The new MB was an ATXV2.2 board with a 24 pin power connector rather than the 20 pin one on my old power supply. Damn...the manual said that I could use the old type of power supply with it and just ignore the pins. Hmmmmmm.
Went out and bought a new up-to-date Power supply just to be sure, and the cheapest stick of RAM I could find.
Antec HENeo 500W modular Power Supply
512Mb Veritech (wee) DDR2533 RAM
Swapping in the RAM and BINGO, all systems are go. Havent had an issue since. Power Supply is just a bonus, but I install it anyway, if only for a cable management and future stability reason. Its rated at 50W less than my old one, but that will make a nice spare in any case.
So at the moment, I have all my core applications and games loaded after a weekend of furious installation. I am limping along on 512Mb of RAM, but will arange for exchanges with WORKING stuff today...unfortunately the shop is in Sydney.
When I get working stuff I will try to offload the spare RAM somewhere. Anyone in need of a cheap stick of DDR2?
Oh, btw. Even hampered by low and underspeed RAM as it is atm, it is FAST.
Running SuperPi and calculating Pi to 8 million decimal places can be done on a single core in 4 minutes 48 seconds. My old 2Ghz Athlon 64 managed the same feat in 7 minutes 33 seconds when spectacularly overclocked, and about 10 seconds slower again when in day-to-day mode. To think that there an entire other CPU waiting idly in the wings makes me positively *image censored*.
