Computer Upgrades
Money was burning a hole in my bank account - specifically, the money which I won’t be spending on LASIK. So I succumbed to the itch and got some computer upgrades… after a Saturday of intense installation effort, I now have:
- MSI Neo Platinum K8T motherboard (SATA, RAID, socket 754)
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (socket 754 - would have got socket 939, but the price premium is way too high. Also didn’t want to pay £60 extra for the 3400+, didn’t seem worth it to me)
- 1GB PC3200 (yes I know, that’s actually a downgrade from the 1.5GB on my old mobo, but easy enough to add another 1GB stick when I feel like it)
- 200GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive
- LG dual layer DVD writer (supports just about every writeable DVD format out there, plus CDs and it reads them too!)
This replaces the obvious bits of my old hardware, except for the hard drives, I still have my two IDE drives. Gradually I’ll migrate my entire Linux setup onto the SATA disk and then reinstall Windows so that I can ditch the 40GB IDE drive. If the SATA seems to go well, I may ditch the 120GB IDE drive as well, and get another 200GB SATA. It’s certainly very quiet…
Had some stress installing Gentoo Linux, I eventually got my old Linux system to boot happily (after some SATA misconfiguration problems, largely centred around an argument of Linux vs the RAID controller), added in the driver for the onboard Ethernet so Linux is now up and running and happy, but I wanted an AMD64 compiled system as well, so that’s what’s been installed on the SATA drive. Being Gentoo it’ll take me a while to compile everything, but there’s no hurry as I have a fully-working system available for when I need it.
Excuse me, it’s now time to play games. I wouldn’t really have thought it, but they’re much improved over the XP2100 even with the same graphics card. I guess there was more bottleneck in the CPU and memory bandwidth than I had previously thought.