COMPUTER PARTS EFF YEAH

Posted on: June 19, 2008

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Working is awesome. And by that, I mean getting paid to swing groceries by a laser and acting nice to people I may or may not respect for anywhere from 4 to 8 hours is awesome.

I had decided over a week ago, I must do something with this money I have earned (that’s a whole $500 after taxes!) because just letting it sit there in the bank is for losers (I will be doing that for basically every month now on.) I decided to upgrade stuff on my computer, while I could (it’s an AGP system, and AGP video cards are the way of the dodo now.)

The tl;dr version: I spent a bunch of money making my computer pretty awesome, despite having only an AGP slot for the graphics card.

Basically, I decided that it was fine time to upgrade my video card, which was a Radeon 9600 Pro (a very solid card,) to get a performance boost from my system. It was the most dated component, and the one that was dragging the rest of the system down. I went to look for the best AGP card I could find, which I am certain is the GeForce 7600GS I got. Despite being a card from two generations ago (and just barely, because the new graphics cards from nVidia just recently got released,) it’s still a solid upgrade, and will do the job prolonging the inevitable massive upgrade I’ll need to do when I jump to a PCI Express system.

But that wasn’t enough, since the card requires more power than the last one, I needed to pick up a new power supply, since I had my old one nearly maxed, so I got a highly rated 500 watt power supply without breaking the bank. And just for good measure, I picked up a case fan and a PCI slot fan to keep temperatures down (also the 7600 GS that I ended up having to order was a “silent” version, meaning no fan for the GPU.)

So the end of last week rolls by and I get my new stuff. I run into a problem, not so surprising to me, and it has entirely to do with the horrible design of the case that I have had to, begrudgingly, deal with for the past 6 years. The new power supply had one fan on it (a massive one, at that,) for cooling itself. The problem is, the old case (which I got for free in a barebones kit back in 2002,) made the decision to keep it smaller, by placing the power supply on top of the processor. Now, I’ve dealt with this for years, a little longer wouldn’t hurt, right? Yeah, except the orientation of the power supply and the slot to hold it would put the fan blowing on to my processor, surely creating a pocket of heat that would never be able to get out, over one of the most sensitive of pieces of hardware. You get what you pay for, they say.

So I decide “Eh, fuck it.” and get a new case, while I “stress test” my new video card by playing every game I have at full settings, the new power supply is just sitting on top of the old case.

I come up across just one other problem that I didn’t think I would see: my computer, despite having the graphics power for it, just couldn’t really keep up with the higher performance of the graphics card. After a look at the symptoms (stuttering during games, low framerates, even though I otherwise was beyond the requirements,) I figured that my processor was unable to keep up with the demands of the video card. Now, my processor was nothing stellar, a Sempron 64 3600+, but it just didn’t have the oomph to keep up, mostly because of it’s low cache (only about 256 kB.) So, in another fit of “Eh, fuck it.” I ordered a new Athlon 64 X2 5400+. Not much of a concern, it was a far superior processor, being a dual core, and outmatching the old one in every way, while still using about the same power as the old one. I could have gotten one of newer processors that use less power, but I didn’t see much of and advantage.

So I play the waiting game, and my case came in just the other day. I open the case, and just instantly know I’m going to love working with it. There was just so much space, a concept very foreign to my old one. I spend about a good three hours transplanting everything from one case to the other, being absolutely floored by the ease of the new case, which had a nearly entirely screwless design, and making sure I had allmy cables and wires  routed away from the center of the motherboard, to help reduce the temperature around the CPU and the graphics card. The indicator lights are a bit birght, but not all that unbearable that it makes me want to disconnect them.

Then today, my processor showed up. More than happy to test to see how easy it is to work around in, I get to putting in the new processor as soon as possible. I’m done in five minutes, popping off the heatsink from the old processor, removing the old processor, then putting in the new processor then heatsink.

Overall, I’m happy, my computer runs and performs faster, and much cooler. I can play new games, play existing ones at higher settings, and just plain do more. Vista is much snappier than before, and the superficial Windows Experience Rating is many points higher than it originally was. I’ve put new life into a system that’s near it’s end, and it should be a good few years before I should consider doing a mass upgrade to a whole new system.

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