I upgraded my computer this past weekend. I should say, I ordered the parts about a week ago, but only now have I had a chance to put them into the computer case. I thought long and hard about this upgrade, and only really did it after I saw encouraging (almost unbelievable) reports of from people who have upgraded to Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs. For this upgrade I was going to keep the original tower case, as it already had three fans mounted on it and the fan controls were conveniently mounted on the front. The CD-ROM and DVD-rom drives were also staying – until I feel rich enough again to finally buy DVD-RW drives. I also wanted to keep my IDE hard drive, but the motherboard that I bought only had one IDE socket. Luckily, I had decided to buy a SATA hard drive as part of my upgrade. No soundcard upgrade either, as I was also going to keep the SoundBlaster X-Fi ExtremeMusic card that I had bought earlier in the year.
But enough talk. Here are the exact components that I bought for the upgrade:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Processor, 2.4 GHz.
2 GBs of RAM, Crucial Technology, 240-pin DDR2 PC2 5300 (2 X 1 GB sticks)
XFX PVT71GUQL3 GeForce 7900GT 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16
eVGA 122-CK-NF68-AR Socket T (LGA 775) NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB 3.5″ SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM
On opening the motherboard package I was greeted with an ink black chipset mounted on the green circuit board. Very slick looking. There was also a metal rod running across the middle of the board connected to what looked to be a pyramid shaped heatsink. Upon mounting the motherboard I remembered why I don’t often upgrade – because it sucks donkey balls to screw stuff into their appropriate mountings. I found myself repeating a phrase over and over as I tried to push tiny screws into place and keep them from falling off before I get the screwdriver on top of them – “They never make it easy.” I should say, this motherboard is from NVIDIA and has the NVIDIA chipset. So, I’m locked into NVIDIA graphics cards, especially if I want to do the dual-card SLI thing. I thought about it when making my decision, and was swayed by the positive reviews for the motherboard. I was also swayed because the only problems I ever had with graphics cards were during the one time I switched from NVIDIA to ATI. And it was during that period that Scott had to take about a 5 hour time out from the lan party to help me update my ATI drivers. So I vowed, never again, and I’m sticking with the big N.
Putting the CPU wasn’t too bad, but even here they didn’t really make it easy. The CPU chip itself has a golden triangle on one corner that you are supposed to align with the LGA 775 socket on the motherboard. The trouble is that the socket itself was black. No diamond. And the freekin notches that you are supposed to align with the CPU are almost undistinguishable to the naked eye. I spent about half a minute gripping the CPU edges while I tried to line things up. Any longer and the sweat from my fingers would have corroded the chip. Luckily I got it lined up and the CPU locked down.
The CPU fan assembly is also a change from the prior model. This time the stock CPU fan has four legs that kind of look like miniature plastic syringes. The idea is to line up the legs with holes in the motherboard and then push down on the syringe plunger until one hears a snapping sound. Kind of weird, and actually kind of scary because you don’t know how much force to exert and whether its not snapping because the force isn’t strong enough or because the plunger isn’t aligned right on top of the hole.
Oh yeah, I did get an unpleasant surprise once the CPU and motherboard were in and I wanted to plug in the 12V power supply for the board. Intel changed from a 20 pin to a 24 pin socket, which meant my 2 year old power supply was now outdated. I was upset when I found this out Friday night at 9pm. Luckily I’m 5 minutes away from a CompUSA and bought a 650W power supply with all the latest sockets as a replacement. As a bonus the replacement PSU came with several velcro ties to bundle wires together inside the case.
The final “this is a bitch” moment came when I was trying to mount the small NVIDIA fan on top of the pyramid shaped heatsink. It has hooks on the back and two tiny screw holes on the base. When I say tiny I mean the size of those screws on people’s eyeglasses. Yes, that small, and very very short. So there were some tense moments as I put the screws into place with a steady hand worthy of a surgeon. This is after several tries of fumbling and wondering where the screws went. Because, oh yeah, the screws are black and did I mention the ink black look of the motherboard?
Eventually the graphics card, sound card, and memory sticks were in place. POST went well, and I was all set to install Windows XP. Unfortunately I kept running into several nasty blue-screen errors. The bad kind that states “Something may be wrong with your recently installed hardware”. The only thing I could think of was that I did try to force one of the memory sticks into the socket the wrong way. After 2 hours of wishing and hoping, I pulled out the “bad” stick and everything worked. Windows XP was installed, I installed the motherboard drivers to get the on-board LAN working and was up and running by Sunday night.
Tune in later as I test drive some recent and older games on it.