Grif gets an upgrade

Posted by Al Twohill on 16 January 2008 | 0 Comments

Tags: hardware, desktop

As I posted in 00000080 bytes of pain, my main PC (Grif) has been having issues, which turn out to be memory related. The nice folks at Unleash have given me some temporary memory while my dud memory is being returned under warranty. It turns out all I had was DDR1, but my motherboard supports 1 & 2, so I've got a 1GB stick of DDR2 at the moment. Meanwhile I've been busy ordering upgraded parts. I've got 2x 1GB sticks of Kingston goodness on its way, as well as a couple of 320GB SATA2 drives with a lovely 16mb of cache.

I also ordered a Asus P5E motherboard which arrived today. As Intel haven't changed their sockets for a while my venerable old P4 3.2GHz fits this new one, so I've decided to hold off on a new CPU till the Intel E8400 comes into NZ next month. 

You can't see from this angle, but this motherboard has another full speed (16x) PCIe slot just above the bottom PCI slot. It's just begging for another HD3870 - I can hear it! Also, I have to say I'm impressed with this camera of Jess's - that CPU fan is doing 2200RPM and its not even blurred!

It wasn't all smooth sailing putting this bad boy in though. The SATA and ATA connectors on this motherboard aim off the side of the board instead of the usual vertical orientation. I later realised that this is to make sure there is room for big-assed graphics cards, but I had other problems. My case is a no-screw jobby and this includes the motherboard which is on a removable tray. The release grip nicely blocked my ATA connector so I couldn't attach my optical drives.  Grim. Oh well, nothing a mini hacksaw can't fix. Now I have half a release grip but its all I need, and at least I have my optical drives again.

I've taken out my Sound Blaster X-Fi eXtreme Music in favour of the SoundMax ADI1988 PCIe card which was included with the motherboard, as it means I can have surround sound in Linux :). I'll trial the sound quality in Windows games and see what I think - I may end up putting the SB back in to take advantage of its 10,000 transistors.

Speaking of Linux, guess which operating system didn't bat an eye at the new motherboard? Hah, and guess which operating system BSOD's on boot at the moment? Not that hard really is it. I'm holding off re-installing windows till my new harddrives arrive, so no games for now (except MotoX).