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Loading ...What I Did Next
oneeyeuk
As I was seriously getting into CS:S and had attended my first LAN event, i28 August ‘06, I was more of the opinion that fps mattered and felt that my Athlon64 3000+ wasn’t quite up to it.
Although it was a venice core, considered to be a good overclocker, I wasn’t confident enough at that time to try properly overclocking it.
So, when I spotted a 3800+ at a bargain price I snapped it up and bought an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro cooler.
Also, not long before the next LAN, i29 November ‘06, I decide to upgrade my gfx and went for an MSi 7900GTO. Cracking card, one of the best stock gfx coolers I’ve seen.
I considered a second 250gig Samsung HDD was in order to do a clean install of Windows, Steam and my games prior to the LAN with no antivirus or firewall (not needed as behind the LAN firewall) to maximise CPU available to increase fps.
Whilst at i29, my PC started playing up with occasional random shutdowns and sometimes it wouldn’t boot up.
It continued, and got worse, when I got back home.
Eventually I tracked the problem down to the crappy northbridge cooler fan.
Had a bit of email ping-pong with Asus support and they were supposed to be sending me an improved replacement cooler, still hasn’t arrived yet, so I ordered a Zalman passive cooler for my northbridge.
Unfortunately, the cooler on my gfx half obscured the northbridge so I had to cut some of the fins off the Zalman heatsink with a junior hacksaw so it would fit.
I was concerned whether this would be a problem.
Fortunately it wasn’t.
The mobo was rock solid stable and, indeed, still is in a PC I built for a friend’s girlfriend.
Before the i30 LAN in April ‘07 I bought the ‘thermally advanced side panel’ for my Akasa Eclipse 62 case with a 120mm fan and honecomb grill pre-fitted. (no pics that I can find yet)
Then, prior to i31 in August ‘07, I went SLi with an Asus A8N32SLi mobo and a second MSi 7900GTO. (no pics that I can find yet)
I also bought a 64X2 4400 dual core processor and a Creative X-Fi PCI-Ex soundcard.
A couple of months later I started having problems, random shutdowns, BSOD’s, terrible problems with all my Steam games, etc.
After a few weeks of messing about I eventually diagnosed dodgy memory, which Crucial have since replaced under their lifetime warranty BTW.
This got me thinking, and it didn’t take me long to be seduced by the idea of a complete system upgrade to Core2.
Which is where I’ll kick off in the next post.
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