[Toptube]

[Toptube]

This is what I'd buy right now for a micro atx board

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186138

It costs almost double, but that other board lacks even basic features like dual channel memory support. Nvdia's boards lately have also lacked in bios features. This Gigabyte actually has a lot of bells and whistles that more expensive boards would have. Also, Gigabyte has been building their boards lately with good capacitors and good power components, so that's nice.

The layout is a bit better than that foxconn, too. Which is pretty important considering the tight spaces this board will be used in and also helps a lot when using a full size video card.

[Toptube]

I actually bought some components last week to make the move to Quad-Core.

Processor
Intel Q9300 I bought mine off Amazon marketplace brand new in un-opened retail box for $200. I've been in contact with the seller just to make sure it wasn't too good to be true.

Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R bought on Amazon for free shipping to Alaska.

Ram
OCZ 2x2GB DDR2 800 I've actually had the ram for awhile, just sitting around waiting to be used. OCZ is a great brand. This particular model has decent timings (not awesome) and overclock pretty well. I probably could have gotten something a little better had I waited and shopped around more, but this ram should serve me well.

That's all the new stuff. Will go with my Gigabyte ATI Radeon 3870, 640GB Western Digital SE16 (2 platters, 320GB per platter, because of the data density, its said to approach the performance of a 10,000RPM drive in benchmarks), and an Antec Neo-HE 650 watt power supply (literally wisper quiet, very efficient).

and this is the beauty that will sit atop my Q9300

OCZ Vendetta II with an white LED aftermarket fan


*shit I need to send $10 to microsoft for my 64-bit Vista Home Premium disc.

[Toptube]

Whoopsie. Here's the board I meant to link:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128354


What do you need 2 optical drives for? And, they DO make SATA optical drives.

[Toptube]

[Toptube]

[Toptube]

My new hard-drive just went out in a spark of glory. It never got to spin its platters for even a second. Thankfully, Western Digital's RMA process is very straightforward/painless. I was even able to get an advance RMA where they send me a new drive before I send the dead drive within 30 days.


Double Plus: The RMA helped me figure out my address problems with Microsoft's site for ordering my Vista home premium 64-bit disc. When entering my address on ANY website, I've always used "Elmendorf AFB" for the city.

Westernd Digital's RMA site didn't like that, but it suggested that I put "Elmendorf Air Force Base" instead. Microsoft's site never suggested as such and I never though to try it. It works!

[Toptube]

This Q9300 Core 2 Quad will be my first ever Intel processor.

So far some things I'm not very impressed with:

The heatsink they give you with your Quad-Core is shit. Its small, I'd feel bad about putting this on my old Athlon XP, and the fan fucking rubs on the aluminum of the heatsink. Whereas AMD has been bundling pretty swank heatpipe coolers since they went dual-core. Right now they give you a good mid-size 4 heatpipe cooler with their quad-cores. Very popular with SFF builders.

Intel's mounting system for their heatsinks is shit. 4 pushpins. Its a bitch to get even pressure when mounting, the pins can be difficult to push in, and it flexes your mobo. I'll probably buy a replacement system that puts a metal bracket on the underside of the mobo and uses for screws instead of push pins. AMD's mounting system is really easy. Set heatsink into mounting bracket (built onto mobo) attach the retention clip to its mounts on either side of the processor, then turn the crank to tighten it and lock the crank into place.

I gotta say I was really reluctant to buy Intel, but unfortunately they've been kicking AMD's ass in clock for clock performance so...

[Toptube]

[Toptube]

My RMA replacement hardrive shipped yesterday with 2 day shipping, so I should have it by saturday noon.

I also ordered the metal bracket thingy for mounting LGA775 processors. So now I'll have a metal brace underneeth my mobo and real screws instead of plastic push-pins. Hopefully that gets here by saturday too, otherwise I'll have to completely take my mobo out when it does arrive.

[Toptube]

I'd put that Audigy 2 back in. Mobo sound might be equivalent in features, but that Audigy is still gonna sound better.

[Toptube]

Well I really thought that my RMA drive would arrive by today, but it didn't.

So I went ahead and built the computer and installed onto my 80gb Maxtor IDE for now until my Western Digital 640mb SATA arrives.

Fuck this board is picky. Apparently you can't run AHCI on the two SATA ports that run off the northbridge, otherwise it disables the IDE port. So at first, my hardrive and LG combo drive weren't showing up at all. Luckily, there are like 37 SATA ports running off the southbridge, so I can run AHCI on those with my in-transit SATA drive and still use my 250GB Seagate IDE that currently houses all of my stuff.

Its also really picky about how you have the jumpers setup. You can't even do cable select. You MUST configure the jumpers on your IDE drives in accordance to how they are arranged on the cable.

Then it wouldn't boot into Vista 64 after doing the install. After hours of troubleshooting, I figured out that it didn't like the IDE cable I was using. A cable that I've used for 3 years on my socket 939 mobo. So I switched the cable and it finally worked.

Man I hate computers! I need to get out of this rap!

[Toptube]

[Toptube]

Oh, well fuck that shit then.

Man, just lookin real quick, there doesn't seem to be anything really great in the medium price range right now for Intel MATX. AMD has a much more interesting selection, So if I was building right now and didn't care about clock for clock gaming performance, I'd go with good ol' AMD.

Biostar has never let me down, though so this might be a decent buy for Intel:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138132


But if I was buying, I guess I'd just blow on the DFI that has a full blown P45 chipset on an MATX board.

This Gigabyte ATX I just bought will be a good board, but man it is picky. Maybe that's how Intel boards go though? This is my first time on their side so who knows.

[Toptube]

My RMA drive that was 2-day shipped last wednesday is just now in my hands today.

Hopefully there is no spark of glory this time.


Also, AMD just came out with their Phenom II chips. 45nm process and a slew of small improvements. They still can't match the core 2 architecture clock for clock, but its a nice improvement over the original Phenom and atleast gets AMD in the ballpark with Core 2. You can forget i7, of course.

The Phenom II 940 black is a 3.ghz stock chip (impressive for AMD) and is said to hit 3.7 pretty regularly in overclocking. If you are building a complete brand new system, you'd still do well (unfortunately) to go Intel. But if you've already got an AM2 or AM2+ board, this is a no brainer drop-in upgrade that will get you similar performance to Core 2 Quads.

For comparison, this 3,0ghz Phenom II chip beats a similarly priced 2.66ghz core 2 quad in a majority of benchmarks. That's really good, considering how badly the Phenom 1 was spanked. Unfortunately though for AMD, if you are an overclocker, just about every Intel Chip priced similarly or under the Phenom II 940 is a better value. Its still a great value though for non-overclockers, upgraders, or HTPC builders who now don't have to sacrifice much in CPU performance for AMD/ATI's arguably better feature set.

[Toptube]

If they pull some magic performance boost for games then I'll give it a go. Otherwise I don't really have much use in trying out a beta OS. If I had faster internet I'd be more inclined, but I'm not living somewhere where it aint no thang to download gigs of data in a short time. So I have to prioritize my downloading.

[Toptube]

Oh my gawd this drive has been formatting for 1.5 hours and its only at 75%

[Toptube]

[Toptube]

Got around to doing some overclocking tonight. I have a Q9300 Core 2 Quad that is 2.5ghz stock. My goal was a 1ghz overclock and I easily reached that. I barely gave it extra voltage. Turns out My ram has quite a bit of headroom too.

470FSB x 7.5 multiplier = 3.5GHZ @1.225V (1.2 is stock)

I raised the northbridge voltage from 1.1 to 1.80. I may not have needed to do that, I will tweak it later.

My ram is Some OCZ DDR2 at the now standard 800MHZ with SLI branding on them that means absolutely nothing. Its stock timings are 5-4-4-15, those are good timings, but not awesome. It was a good balance though between price and performance. Besides, Core 2 Quads respond more to higher MHZ (more bandwidth) than lower timings because the memory controller is on the board, not part of the CPU like AMD. So Core 2's are constantly begging for bandwidth. It takes some special magic to get CAS/CL 4 ram to do high speeds, whereas CAS/CL 5 ram usually has a lot of overclocking potential. Even Value ram from certain brands can do pretty well.

My ram would only go about 50mhz above stock with the default timings. I relaxed them to 5-5-5-15 and am now at 900 something. I think its 940mhz right now. That's with no extra voltage. With extra voltage, I could surely break 1000. I'm gonna play with that more later as well.

[Toptube]

[Toptube]

When I installed Vista 64, I had 1 Sata HDD and 1 IDE HDD. I bought another of the same Sata HDD to get rid of the IDE. Even thought the 1st SATA drive is my OS drive, Vista decided to make the IDE my system disck (it had BOOTMGR on it and was the ACTIVE disc) so when I took it out, I couldn't boot to my SATA OS drive.

To fix it, I had to put the IDE drive back in, boot to Vista, and then mark the SATA drive as an Active drive. Then with the IDE drive once again removed, I had to boot into the recovery console on the Vista 64 retail disc and use the tools in there to fix my boot tables (effectively putting BOOTMGR onto my Sata OS drive).

blargh.

[Toptube]

If anyone is in the market for a power suppply, this is a DEAL
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817103941

I personally own the 650 watt version. These are powerfull, Modular, very efficient, mega quiet, and manufactured by Seasonic (see: the best).


I also have a cheapass case. The military's moving company damaged my SFF X-pack case when I first got up here. Shipping a case to Alaska costs about 100% of the cost of the case, so I said fuck that and had my computer spread out on a spare desk and used it that way for a long time. But Bestbuy.com had deal on this no name case, it was $6 with $8 dollar shipping. It turns out its not a terrible case. Air flow is good and everything lines up to the PCI mounts. It doesn't dampen noise at all, but that's not really a big deal because all of my stuff is pretty much the quietest that you can get.


*fixed my typos, geeeezz.

[Toptube]

Here's another power supply deal on an Antec Earthwatts 650
http://shop4.frys.com/product/5503410