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thewelshbrummie
A few things to mention in this relatively quick update:
When I wrote my last post, I suggested that I was going to buy a 2nd TV card as my Compro T750F only had a single DVB-T tuner. What I didn’t say at the time was that I was eying a Compro E700 on eBay, which I won for £40: a £15 saving on a new card. The card I’ve bought was as good as new, with all the cables in original packaging. So I’ve now got 3 digital tuners and 2 TV cards in my computer. I’ve followed through with the registry hack I linked to in my previous post, but I don’t have the cables to split my TV signal for both coaxial sockets… yet. Tesco have £1 male/female extenders and a splitter for the same price, so it’s just a small matter of buying them when I go there next.
I’ve also been rather concerned by my CPU temps… currently they idle at 60ish degrees at stock speed and a small overclock of 20MHz to a speed or around 2.2GHz (stock FSB rated at 200) pushes the temperature of my CPU to well in excess of 80 degrees…. with the TJunction being rated at 85: basically my whole rig should shutdown when this is exceeded, which has yet to happen but I have had random hangs and the BIOS does reset itself rather regularly.
This is simply down to the stock Intel cooler: not that it isn’t effective but simply that I can’t get all 4 pins to mount properly and I would rather not damage my £200 motherboard, so…
… I’ve bought the Tuniq Tower from yoyotech. Chance has me in London on Sunday so I’ll pick it up then. It will require a complete rebuild thanks to requiring a mounting plate behind the motherboard but it looks completely worth the £36, especially as I can drop the fans to a slow speed for my CPU.
I’ve also done some limited cable tidying, in part thanks to me being unable to use the card reader USB ports… I thought they worked but a quick test proved otherwise. They now work using the supplied cable rather than the USB header cable I purchased but it’s an inelegant solution, as the cable is routed through one of the rear water cooling holes to the back panel. But it does give me 4 front mounted, usable USB ports.
This has also freed up one of my USB headers. As the iMon USB cable has a USB/USB header converter included in the box, I’ll be rerouting it to the now free USB header. This will free up one of the 2 USB ports on my USB PCI card, which allows me to install my old Bluetooth USB dongle inside my case. I didn’t think I’d have any use for it but I’ll be replacing my mobile phone in July when the Sony Ericsson W980 is launched; which allows bluetooth data transfer (I need to replace my mobile anyway as the internal speaker on my Motorola V500 has failed, so I have to send all calls to speakerphone, far from ideal).
Beyond the above, I’m still undecided regarding the other upgrades previously mentioned (Blu-Ray, replacement TFT, GPU) but they’ll probably wait until prices drop. As for the CPU, I’ll still be upgrading to a Quad core CPU in the near future but there’s been reports this week of a Q9650 being launched in the 3rd quarter (Jul-Sep) - so I’ll wait for that to become available before deciding, especially as the Q9550 is rumoured to drop to the same price as the Q9450 when that happens. And there appears to be some movement in the GPU market but as stated previously, there’s little point in upgrading until I buy a new TFT…. and the Dell 2408 is very tempting!
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