This might be the worst possible time for my computer to break. Right before the new set of DX10 hardware comes out, right when whether you buy the best on the market or just enough to get buy in roughly 2 months you’ll want the new stuff.
I’m still running my old AGP 8x graphics card, a lowly GeForce 6800GT (retail price circa 2004: $400, now: $30?). Only one of the best selling DX9 cards out there. Unfortunately for me, my aging Motherboard and CPU combo is letting out death cries, seems almost a certainty they will soon be releasing their magical blue smoke and moving on to the next electronic life. Since I’ve loved my ASUS board and my Athlon XP 2800+ so much their being kind enough to emit warning signs that they will soon be dying. These choice signs are twofold: one, opening more than one program results in a catastrophic slowdown, and two, the fan on my processor is emitting a noise that can only be described as “deafening”. The noise is like a drunkard taking hand mixer in a steel bowl (not something I’ve witnessed, but the closest approximation my mind can come up with).
I even had my father come take a look at my computer. In spite of the fact that we have built many computers; the only thing we could seem to do was jiggle the processor and mutter: “That’s really f!&*ed up…”
So I had to trudge to my local computer store to purchase a cheap fix for my rig. I wanted to salvage the once expensive GPU so I had to order a motherboard online that could take new processors and still had an old AGP slot on it. Apparently, no one wants the customer to have options so all motherboard manufacturers make two motherboards: the Intel board and the AMD board. On the bright side, I got a discontinued board for 40 bucks.
Now that I had a board and a GPU, I knew that I had to make a bit of a purchase. My old generic RAM that I bought 5 years ago was DDR-333. Which meant I couldn’t use it anymore. So the question became: do I get nice ram and make Vista run better or do I get the bare minimum to make the computer work?
I decided to get some nice DDR2-800 RAM, and 2 gigs of it to boot. I figured since I’ll demote this computer to server/youtube on the TV status someday I might as well make it run Vista well.
Now the only component left was the processor. I wanted to get at least the same performance as my old 2800+. Which I relayed to the store clerk. And then he laughed at me, I wasn’t aware but apparently my processor had gone from bleeding edge to the processor equivalent of the Flintstones’ car in the 5 years since I purchased it. No one had told me though, I was too busy still playing the latest and greatest games with ease. The 2800+ runs at a brisk 2.08ghz and the mid range replace I bought yesterday only runs at 2.2ghz. Not much of an increase.
Until you realize there’s two cores in the thing.
I purchased the Athlon X2 4400+, which is a 64bit dual-core processor with twice the cache size as my old chip. It churns out nearly three times as much data as my beloved flintstones-mobile. Needless to say, when the motherboard finally gets dropped off by UPS two seconds later I’ll be tossing my processor out the nearest window without an ounce of remorse.
I’ve had people ask me over the years how I built my own computer. So I’m going to document the swap in order to show how not difficult the whole process really is. I suppose I’ll post my Windows Experience Index as a metric for what improvement I’m going to see. I hope there’s some improvement…
