So my power supply arrives today, installed it but never got to switch on computer until around 10pm tonight. It worked, a few little problems so had to change over jumpers with hdd and cd roms (master, slave etc...). I never bothered trying the 350watt or 550 watt. The Q tech 550 was a really cheap psu and poor quality, so I never wanted to try that. I ended up using one 80GB ATA hard drive to install XP on, and will get all the data using external case drive thing for the two other hard drives (which contains lots of videos, photos, music and so on). There wasn't really another way of actually booting up the system as the hardware was completely new. The first boot up I did monitor the hardware monitor in BIOS, to check CPU temperature, fans and stuff. Always do that first. The asus bored has some neat overclocking tools too, which i'll check out after I get all my software loaded.
Gregg, I was going to go with the quad core, but I was basically forced to upgrade, plus i'm not loaded lol. I was actually trying to wait it out to get the quad core, or even more! The 80 core processor should be arriving within the next 3 years according to intel, but probably delays will happen, so say 5+ years.
I am also a crazy multi tasker, sure the 2 core processor will help a bit, but I know what you're saying about quad core. I think that I may have been a little too hastey in choosing which CPU I went with this time. My first computer was an INTEL 166MMX, then a P3, and after than I went over to AMD and have stuck with them. I guess I fear change again a little. I always tend to go with ATI now too... not had an Nvidia card in a LONG time. I hope to sell this graphics card at the end of the year for a ATI HD2900XT 1024mb Graphics card and upgrade RAM to 4GB, as its real cheap at the moment.
Next on my list though is getting a new monitor as the one I have is REAL blurry. So might get the Samsung 22" or dell 24" monitor in the next couple months. Not played any games or anything yet, but doing general stuff, loading times etc... seem to be much faster now. Extremely quiet PC as well, good choice of fans.
This is the first time I've actually really bought myself anyway for a long time, usually my money all goes on food and supplements. One thing I told myself I have to do in the next week is CAP my shopping budget. So if I run out of something, tough... Its the only way, beacuse shopping is sometimes reaching like 40 pounds a week just for me! Thats around $80.
I'm also thinking about giving up my Multi and taking specific supplements or possibly lower the dose of Essential mix so that it lasts around 3 months or something.
anyway gotta go install, configure and stuff :)
Almost forgot!
What do you think of Vista. You reckon I should wait a bit until they sort out updates, fixes, compatibility issues.... ?
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1 comment:
Yeah, I can certainly understand about being forced to upgrade right away.. sometimes life just forces that on a person..
Quad core is about ideal from a number of aspects right now: little software actually uses all 4 cores at once, but that's not bad.. but a fair amount of stuff uses 2 cores, which still leaves you 2 cores to run whatever in the background... still, dual core isn't bad, and is preferable to single core.. I've heard that it does provide quite a perceptible speed increase just with general multitasking (I'm running an AMD Athlon64 1.8GHz with a weak ATI 9550 AGP because of money reasons, but I chose carefully, and I can manage with that for now.. as long as I don't try to play NWN2 or Oblivion.. just as well, because of schoolwork.. but I think you know about that :) )
Right now, AMD is sorely lacking on the CPU side.. Intel Core 2 Duo and later blow anything AMD out of the water and will for the forseeable future.. NVidia likewise is much stronger than ATI(AMD), at the end of the year when you upgrade video, I'd strongly suggest getting a NVidia 8800 series or later.. right now the 8800 GTS 320MB is at the sweet-spot. See http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2988
for an excellent article about the 2900 XT... in fact, I strongly recommend anandtech.com as a good "keep up with hardware" site.. it's 1st on my list, with techreport.com being my 2nd choice. I read both daily.
Upgrading to 4GB isn't a bad idea, but won't give you any real benefit right now (I assume you're running XP).. still, it won't hurt either.
You may want to hold out monitorwise because of a change of monitor tech probably starting to appear in decent-sized screens by the end of the year.. still, if you have to upgrade your monitor, there's some good 22" screens out there.. (again, check anandtech, but yeah, Samsung and Dell make some nice screens).
Avoid Vista like the plague. It may eventually be an adequate choice in a couple of years, but right now, there's major issues.. not that it's not stable (it is), but it's not bug free either, and there's a host of security related issues.. besides, do you really want an OS that phones home to microsoft frequently? Vista does, and you can't turn that off... and there's more.. so, again, avoid Vista.. oh, and when you install XP, don't let it download and install the "genuine advantage" stuff.. but that particular bit isn't critical, just useless (sends some info from your computer to microsoft on a regular basis).
Hope this helps!
Gregg
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