Miscellaneous Geekery

I was out and about in the warrens of the Sham Shui Po golden Arcade today and decided it was finally time to upgrade from Pentium III based hardware. I didn't want to have to shell out for a graphics card on top of a computer, so that meant something with an AGP slot. However, neither did I want to be stuck with no upgrade option on the graphics front, so I needed a PCI-Express slot as well. There's not a lot with both of those, and the only one with a native AGP 8X is the ASRock 939 Dual SATA2, which is a pretty well specified bit of kit, considering it retailed for HK$420!

The motherboard will take a dual-core AMD, but I decided not too go for that at the moment. They're still a bit on the expensive side, and I wanted to build a machine on the cheap, as always! I went for the entry level AMD 64 3000+, a 1.8Ghz chip, roughly equivalent to a Pentium 4 3.0. This is to build a better Windows box, not a linux box. Linux really works much better with multiple processors.

Plenty of RAM helps too, so I got 1GB in one stick, with the prospect of another 1GB stick to get dual channel ram going.

Of course, given that I have to re-install windows when going from one dual processor 1Ghz pentium box to another of almost the same specification, going to a 64-bit single processor meant that it took me a while to get everything working again.

Total cost of upgrade: HK$1920. Not bad, considering I had to replace the motherboard, processor and RAM. Plus I have an upgrade path for the graphics card via PCI-Express and also for the processor, via the AM2 slot.