With Windows 7 still downloading at the office, I decided to do the hardware upgrades tonight, even though I didn’t quite hit my goal of finishing King’s Bounty first.
It actually went a bit smoother than expected, with only two major hiccups. The first was when I went to install a new 120mm fan to improve airflow, when I suddenly realized that I didn’t know which direction it was supposed to face… Fortunately it’s the same style as a couple other fans in the system, so I was able to deduce the direction from that, and confirmed it with a sheet of paper. The second was getting the BIOS settings right, since this motherboard doesn’t seem to do a very good job of autodetecting all the right settings. It only took a little bit of fiddling to get it up to the proper 2.83GHz speed, though.
It’s practically an entirely new machine at this point, with a new CPU (Q9550 quad-core, replacing an E6600 dual-core), more memory (from 2 to 6GB), bigger drives (1.25TB total), and a new video card (Radeon 4870). It is actually missing something, though — I yanked out the Audigy 2 sound card I’d been using before. Creative’s support for newer OSes with older cards has been a bit lacking, so I’ll take a chance on the onboard sound for now.
Now I just have to put some OSes back on it…
I haven’t bothered to buy a sound card, been happy with the onboard.
also, the machine sounded good until you mentioned ATI :P
Heh, I would have preferred the Nvidia GTX 285, but it alone would have been more than the rest of the parts put together… The 4870’s doing fine for now, though one of the older games is giving me a little bit of trouble (weird vertical bars in Victoria: Revolutions).