after many failing bits, dodgy RAM, corrupt data and general lack of anything decent in terms of FPS during so of the even least intensive games it was decided that it had to go…well not quite it will get farmed downstream for something else, but definietly without the dodge bits…
so let me start from the beginning..or close there of…
got donated a Abit NF7-S from a mate, hence decided need a new case and obviuosly at that point matching processor and RAM, if I remember correctly it was a AMD athlon 3000XP or thereabouts…
Nice setup in the case, multiple HDD’s buy cooling was a bitch and the northbridge fan screamed fromtime to time…something after this minor upgrade was the additon of a decent (at that time anyways..) videocard. NVIDIA 5700 ultra – was never particularly impressed by it, ran loud and heated up my case!
Next came the cooling upgrade, quite a whule after the video card came out, so a tracked down a dirt cheap cooler for the vid card from www.pccasegear.com.au, on special for $9 or something silly. Also picked up a stack of nice quiet nexus 80mm fans…..so what about that northbridge..yep fixed that screamer with a passive cooler..looks funky too.
so this setup ran nice and quiet and had reasonble performance….could run CSS on its defaulted selected values (no HDR etc) and get about 35fps in the benchmark…nothing to write home about…but hey its worked!
decent cooling and a fairly stable system resulted in some overclocking, mainly on the video card…
using rivatuner (excellent program by the way) I bumped the 5700 ultra up to a core speed of 580 and memclock speed of 1100. With these setting I was getting a nice 48-50fps in the CSS bench, cooling was no issue barely even noticed it.
typically 23-25 degrees during idle and up to 50 degrees during stress.
So finally the 2008 upgrade, here are the specs. Note made the switch from AMD to Intel for the Proc on this occasion.
Proc: Intel E8500 (runs dual 3.16Ghz)
RAM 4gb Geil (nothing really special just 5 stuff)
Mobo: MSI P45-NEO2
Video Card: Gigabyte ATI/AMD HD4850
Power Supply: Corsair HX620
new 500gb seagate 7200.11
existing 500gb seagate 7200.11
existing 320gb seagate 7200.9?
