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Loading ...The Upgrade Cascade
khenry
“Personally, I’m keeping my old machine which passed its third birthday at Easter, together as a single unit.” Famous last words.
In the middle of last week the machine cut out during Supreme Commander Forged Alliance and something, whether it was the BIOS, or circuitry on the motherboard, blew. I needed to swap out the AGP card to get a display, which was the top line of the BIOS logo where the machine froze and refused to post at all. Damn, I thought, I’ll have to spend hundreds of pounds on new equipment. A tragedy. 
In the end, key reviews over Christmas from issues 53 to 56 influenced my emergency rebuild, even if I’d wanted to upgrade for a long time and had my birthday as another reason to make the move. Not being made of money I decided to upgrade my Socket A backup PC as that was truly for the scrap heap despite outlasting my Socket 939 rig. The Intel super-machine can be constructed in the future when I have the budget to justify a bigger case. For that reason I kept the venerable Jeantech Phong case for no-brainer cooling and of the LG optical drives, the burner was a SATA model. My WD 500Gb hard disk could also now run at its full SATA 300.
As I was happy with dual core Athlon X2 chips but wanted PCI-E 2.0 for peanuts, I opted for the MSI K9A2 CF motherboard and stepped up the Athlon X2 range from the 3800+ to the Socket AM2-4400+. This 2.3Ghz model, the fastest CPU within the price range of my Socket 939 X2. Together with the board review, issue 53’s processor labs showed many of the lower AM2 X2s (below the rare 1Mb cache per core and Black Editions) benchmarking with negligible variances in fps ratings in the game benchmark tests.
The final contribution from issue 53 and 54 was ATi’s Radeon HD 3850. The events in the labs test now feel like a repeat of the GeForce4 Ti4200 and Ti4600, vs the Radeons 9600 Pro and 9800 Pro, then XT - ATi’s HD 38xx cards support all official standards fully, but Nvidia’s 8800GT is just faster with brute speed and still available, with the 9600GT set to take over. In an attempt to make Crossfire more attractive, ATi cut the price, meaning that the twice-tested Sapphire 3850 dropped to £83, and the review street price of £100 would buy you the 512Mb version if you thought there were games that would make use of it. I chose Corsair’s TwinX Value RAM from the Issue 55 Build Your Own PC thanks to the memory set’s low power demands.
Originally I was going to attempt to overclock my Socket 939 CPU and made the hallowed trip to Yoyotech for an Artic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro on the same day that I bought Issue 55. I’m glad that it won’t need reinstalling before decent Phenom CPUs arrive (so maybe never). Once this monster was attached, it sat in the same relative postion as the Issue 55 case photo, almost fouling the first RAM bank. I had to detach Jeantech’s air baffler but could leave the 80mm fan to sit directly over the Freezer 64. This would give me the welcome effect of helping to vent cool air thanks to the Artic Cooling’s much discussed but still very scary cooling ability.
As it turned out, my Hiper Type R 480W PSU, a slight update on an earlier version which luckily provided a 24-pin ATX connector. It benefitted from the choice of power friendly GPU and DIMMs. When Sapphire’s PCI-E converter was chained to a Molex plug on my unit because it was the spring 2005 edition rather than the one from Autumn 2005, it could power the Radeon 3850 without any problems. This PSU’s fan audibly strained to cool whichever chipset feature was overheating on the dead Gigabyte board.
Since the installation of the MSI board the Hiper has since returned to problem free, near-silent operation and its red LED light now mixes in with my green side fan. This machine has been on for 12 hours and thanks to the Artic Cooler, the case temperature has failed to breach 30 degrees and the air from the case is barely warm. That makes the PC ready for any extended heatwave in summer. Looking at my initial benchmarks using Vista Business, it’s faster than the issue 55 Build Your Own, that but machine would sail past my build, espcecially in the multitasking stakes, by promoting the Pentium D chip to a Core 2 E-series. Then overclocking would probably become unnecessary. This build gives the option of a better chip in the same socket just as the P31 Chipset does for Intel processors, until Nehalem’s socket makes its debut anyway.
It suited my purposes to move to the modern generations of RAM, GPU connector and processor socket for £200. The power supply I bought proved to be unecessary, but that’s another story. Right now, I’m off to finish that multiplayer game of Forged Alliance, and my hardware won’t blow up in the middle of it this time.
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