Moving killed my motherboard... [Archive]

LA_MERC_MadMAX

February 21st, 2008, 04:48 PM

Somehow my PC didn't survive the move, so since I was so "smart" and bought a freaking Gateway, I had to get a new case, motherboard and DVD-R (Cause the Gateway drive is "sculpted" to the case.

Couldn't afford to do CPU too, but my AMD still has some life in it - perhaps I'll get a chance to do a full upgrade next year...

I did get a SLI board w/ the Nforce 570 - I hope that's a decent choice - I'm so out of it now - but from my quick research it seemed to be a decent middle of the road chipset for AMD - I'm probably not going to ever run SLI, but I can if I find a deal I can't refuse on a PNY 7900GS :)

LA_MERC_MadMAX

February 28th, 2008, 07:22 PM

Well, it actually wasn't my motherboard, as the same thing happened once I re-built - it was 2 sticks of RAM!

I can't afford to buy 2 more sticks right now, so I'm running on 2GB, but that's cool - I just loaded XP instead of Vista - evens out I guess :)

I didn't spend a lot on a case either - it's a very Plain-Jane Systemax (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?Sku=SYX-803102)from Tiger Direct but it actually looked nicer than I expected, and it's solid w/ a lot of room.

Anyway - once everything was said and done the only thing really left over from the Gateway was a 250GB PATA Drive that is now a Secondary (or thidonary) drive. I had bought a new CPU about 2 months ago to try and squeeze some more life out of this guy, and it didn't originally come w/ the vid card, now that I have a new case, mobo, SATA HDD and SATA DVD-RAM, it's basically a new build :)

Basically what I'm running now is:
AMD Athlon X2 4600+ (2.4GZ)
Biostar T-Serice TF570SLI Mobo
2GB DDR2 800 (PC6400) RAM
1X WD 320GB, 16MB Cache SATA HDD
1X WD 250GB 8MB Cache PATA HDD
1X Seagate 120GB 8MB Cache PATA HDD
Nvidia GeForce 7900GS (Overclocked to 500/1400)
SB Audigy X-fi

I would have never thought I'd buy a Biostar board either, but the T-Series line has had great reviews from Extremetech and Anandtech, I thought I'd give it a go, and I am impressed - for $80 I don't think I could have done any better, but time will tell.

Not bleeding edge, but it'll do me for a while still - the new Mobo alone made a huge difference in performance - the crappy ECS board in the Gateway would only do DDR2-667, so now I can run my RAM at full speed, and I'm sure the Nforce 570 faster overall than the Nforce 405 that was in the Gateway.

I do like my CPU cooler though, and I snapped a pic before I mounted the Mobo in the case - it's a monster - and had good reviews around the net - it's an OCZ Vendetta and it's keeping my 4600+ as around 30 C idle (vs. the 45 C idle w/ the stock cooling.)