Friday, February 21, 2003

New Toys

Hooking up my new MB / CPU / RAM in my 2nd game machine... this motherboard has everything (Firewire, USB v2, two LAN ports)... (way too many connectors to get hooked up). Took me about 2 hours to rip out the old motherboard and install the new one (this upgrade cost me $850, but is replacing a 1Ghz AMD which was using 768Mb of PC133 memory). The only thing I was not able to do was switch over to SATA/150 drives (the motherboard comes with a built-in RAID1 SATA/100 controller. I did look for the drives, but all of the SATAs that I could find were backordered roughly a month or more. So I'm going to stick with my tried and true Promise FastTrak66 for the moment and upgrade the drives this fall (since that'll force me to rebuild the O/S again... which I tend to do every 6-9 months).

AthlonXP 2600+
2 x 512Mb PC2700 CL2
Asus A7N8X Deluxe
NVidia Ti4600 GeForce AGP 4x 128Mb
Promise FastTrak66 PCI RAID Card
(2) 40Gb Maxtor HDs

Currently rebuilding the mirror set, then I get to install the O/S, all of the drivers, the O/S updates... then run the burn-in program on it for a day or two. At which point I'll have to rearrange some things on my desk because I'm going to want to switch which PC is where. If I skip the burn-in test, I could be up and logging into EQ (shock!) sometime tomorrow night. The old system's PCMark2002 scores were CPU: 2500 MEM: 2000 HDD: 575 and I'm expecting new scores of roughly CPU: 6000 MEM: 4500 HDD: 600.

So far so good on the burn-in (let it run for 8 hours while I slept). CPU only got as high as 42/43C which is perfect. (I'm using the stock fan that AMD sends in the retail version of the CPU). Currently doing the Windows Update shuffle... then I get to shuffle the office around this morning.

Labels: Benchmarks, NVIDIA

posted by Wuphon's at 8:16 PM