Technical > PC Hardware Discussion/Reviews > Your System - September 2008

Your System - September 2008

My old system:

1 gig of DDR 2 Corsair ram,
MSI K9VGM-V mother board
AMD Athalon 64 AM2 Duo core 1.9 Mhz.
7900GT EVGA Nvidia video card.
250 GB SATA hard drive.

Vista Experience was a 4.7
Loading a game like 2nd life took forever.

The above I just upgraded to:
AMD Black box phenom 9950 quad core 2.6 Mhz.
2 gig of DDR2 Corsair Ram
MSI K9N6PGM2 mother board. It's AM2+ enabled
500 GB SATA Hard drive as the main drive and the 250 HDD as the secondary.
Vista experience 5.4
2nd life runs alot smoother, World of Warcraft looks great. Going to load Bioshock and World in Conflict to see how good the DirX 10 is.

Experience with this change:

I asked a salesperson at Microcenter if I would have to reinstall Vista after swaping out the Mobo and CPU. He said no, all I'd have to do was reactivate it.
So I went home did the swap and of course Vista wouldn't load. It tried to but it wouldn't. My Ubuntu however would load. So I reinstalled Vista without formatting [didn't want to lose a few files]. That worked. Then my new video card driver refused to load.
Turned out that the reason why I was having so many problems was:

Version of Vista on the PC: Sp1. Version of Vista trying to "repair" Vista on PC: Just plain Vista. So I had to download Sp1 in order to install my video drivers [plain version of vista was to old to know what the video card was].

Anyhow the bugs are worked out and the new hardware is running great. Thanks to Tcub for his support in getting the hardware for this upgrade.

Moral of the story is this: If using old version of Vista and you have upgraded to Vista SP1, do a backup so you can use that to "save" your PC. As the old version maybe to old to "save" the PC.
--
Omne initium est difficile

mmhmm! Its a very nice PC! Cant wait to see Bioshock and and World in Conflict on it! (Spore will come soon! )

My system is an "Aluminum" 20" iMac running OS X (10.5.4) Leopard, with an Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.4Ghz, 250GB Hard drive, 2GB DDR2 800Mhz Ram, and ATi Radeon 2400XT!

@ Stock it with 1GB of ram which I felt was insufficient for what I wanted to do so I upped it to 2GB and now OS X is just screaming! The multitasking capabilities are awesome. As for gaming World of Warcraft runs pretty good but loads in only a couple of seconds, and Spore Creature Creator runs flawlessly on High settings at my highest resolution (1680x1050).

The one thing I'm looking to try to due to match snakeoil's PC is get myself an animated desktop similar to what you can do in Vista Ultimate, on his computer!

reply to dbmaven
First computer I ever built myself:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz
ASUS P5Q Deluxe P45 Intel Motherboard
G.SKILL 4GB SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 Video Card
Western Digital Caviar 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
CORSAIR CMPSU-620HX 620W Power Supply
Antec Nine Hundred Computer Case
LG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner SATA
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

I am quite happy with it but it was a pain to build for me since I'm not very mechanically inclined. I might go back to buying a pre-built computer next time.

reply to dbmaven

reply to dbmaven
Should have been posted here.

Replaced OCZ Powerstream 520 (Died and RMA'd)
with OCZ ModXStream-Pro 600

Replaced all hard drives with 2 x Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 500GB SATA2 7200RPM 16MB

Upgraded EVGA 8800GTS 512 to EVGA GTX 260

Pics here: »Your System - July/August 2008

Latching SATA cables are on order.
--
Need-based health care not greed-based health care.

reply to dbmaven
Just finished my recent upgrade yesterday, and for once I'm happy to say the pain I went through was very little -- sans the Noctua NH-C12P, which is incompatible with this board and my case (I've blogged about it, but haven't put up the videos yet).

Nothing is overclocked.

• MB - Asus P5Q SE



• CPU - Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
  • S-Spec SLAWQ; I couldn't get ZZF to guarantee me a SLB8V, but I don't overclock anyways
  
  
  • Nexus LXM-8200 sink/fan
  
  
  • Idle core temps: 33C, 31C, 34C, 35C
  
  
  • Load core temps: 41C, 43C, 42C, 43C
• VGA - Leadtek GeForce 7950 GT



• RAM - Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4



• DVD - Pioneer DVR-212DBK



• Monitor - Dell 2407WFP



• Sound - Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer



• Disk - Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS



• Case - Antec P182 (case fans at "low" speed setting)

reply to dbmaven
my old system

Amd Athlon 3500
BFG kt6 motherboard
BFG 8800GTS OC video card
X-fi fatality
Raptor HD
maxtor 6 HD
2gigs memory
XP and tried Vista

New system

Intel E8500 processor
Evga 780i sli motherboard
BFG 8800GTS OC
X-fi fatality
Raptor HD
Maxtor 6 HD
2 gigs Mushkin pc-6400 memory
22inch WS samsung 226BW
Vista

I love my new computer, I stll like AMD(build my first computer with a super socket7 motherboard), but went with Intel for the first time.

reply to DKS

reply to dbmaven
I guess this counts as a new system.. It came about when a friend gave me a motherboard she bought - and couldn't use.. because she got a BTX board..

Intel D946GZTS motherboard -- »www.intel.com/products/desktop/m···view.htm

So I ended up buying the following:

Gateway 6-Bay Mid-Tower uBTX Case -- »support.gateway.com/s/Cases/6bay···nv.shtml ($33)

CPU: Intel E2220 Dual Core 2.4GHz ($81)

Memory: 4GB Kingston KVR667D2N5/2G -- »www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configu···7D2N5/2G ($54)

DVD Drive: Samsung TS-H552D ($15)

Heat-sink: Gateway BTX Copper/Aluminum for 130w CPU ($16)

Everything I paid for, the total cost came to $199.. The rest I moved from my now previous system:

Video: PNY GeForce 8500GT 512MB DDR2 conncted to a Dell E228WFP 22" wide-screen LCD.

Hard Drive(s): Seagate ST3500630AS 500GB SATA , Maxtor STM3200820AS 200GB SATA Drive, and a Samsung HD400LD 400GB PATA Drive.

Sound: Diamond Extreme Sound 7.1 connected to a Logitech THX Z-5300e 5.1 speaker set.

All in all a nice improvement over the previous system, a Dell E510 with a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 Dual Core w 2GB ram.. I especially appreciate the quiet.. the very loud Dell fan would whine when under any CPU load.. this machine, thanks to the over-sized heat-sink, the CPU runs at 39C with no fan.. with a standard (and very quiet) 90mm fan blowing across it, idles at 31C, and under load the highest I saw was 51C..

The only downside is cannot overclock - the board has settings for the CPU, memory and pci bus but any attempt at a change the system locks up - no boot.
--
My name is beerbum and I approve this message.