Monday, April 16, 2012

The mission:

Back in the depths of the recession of 2009, we jumped the bullets on the wall of the Dream Machine for normal weight three smaller teams. Instead of an ode to over $ 10,000, we have established teams of real people to build. Our mid-range $ 1400, we called the budget surplus, was equipped with an Intel Core i7-920 overclocked to 3.5 GHz on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard with 6 GB of DDR3 memory, a boot disk of 1.5 TB, and the best dual-GPU. Radeon HD 4870x2

The budget surplus is showing its age, almost three years! I had many people question whether such systems is the time for a new team, but I'm hesitant to recommend a major update before Ivy Ivy Bridge and the Bridge-E.

Instead of going all on a new machine, I will bring our 2009-era box today with some improvements that will make the machine feel again, and you will be able to take with me when I do not bite the bullet on a new processor and motherboard.

strategic maneuver

[caption] Our machine surplus as it was in 2009.

As mentioned earlier, I will not give a new construction here. I just want to make her life a little more than my X58 system. The Core i7-920 is still a processor has four cores and multithreading well, and overclock like a champ. And with Ivy Ivy Bridge and the Bridge-E on the horizon, it does not make sense to upgrade my CPU yet.

The motherboard is a strange: it was a fiscal council in mid-2009, and although it has triple channel DDR3, only four DIMM slots instead of the usual six. Fourth DIMM slot, if used, is the total amount of memory at the expense of bandwidth. When they built the machine, we used three 2GB DIMMs for a total of 6GB. RAM is cheap these days, and four 4 GB DIMMs costs only a little over three DIMMs of 4GB, so I'll buy a kit of 16 GB and the use of three DIMMs, maintaining the fourth in reserve for when you change motherboards later. It still gives me 12 GB of RAM, twice what this machine was seized.

As much as I want an SSD, I do not spend a fortune at the moment, so I'll wait for the update of the platform. Until then, I'll take the hard drive, optical drive, case and power of the old building, and still going strong. Well, the hard drive has been replaced by a Caviar Black 1 TB at some point, but since it happened in the past does not count indefinitely. I'll add a $ 30 USB 3.0 PCIe expansion card, because I like USB 3.0 and it's the only way you can get without an updated motherboard.

graphics card, however, is four years, sucks power, and supports DirectX 11, even, so it must go. I am replacing it with a new Sapphire Radeon HD 7950. At $ 480, is cheaper and faster than a GTX 580, compatible with DirectX 11, and consumes less power than the old card it replaces. With radiator Sapphire accessories market, is also much cooler.

The original configuration called Windows 7 Release Candidate, but I'm operating under the assumption that anyone who still uses X58 have been upgraded to a real version of Windows 7 RC when it stopped working, so Number of Don t "as an upgrade to Windows 7. The total cost of the RAM, USB 3.0 card and GPU? Only $ 605.

collapse

Before beginning the process of upgrading, I uninstalled the drivers for the old video card. Can I disable the system and started the update. The first thing I did was remove the old RAM and GPU system. He also took the opportunity to remove the heat sink, clean the old thermal paste and reapply.

is a good idea to do this every year or so, and I was bad about it. I ArctiClean in two stages Arctic Silver thermal compound remover ($ 10, www.arcticsilver.com) and Arctic Silver 5 ($ 13, www.arcticsilver.com).


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