Thanks to my brother, who gave me an ancient Dell Dimension 3000 to fettle up for him and I decided to give his Dell a bit of a makeover using some of my bits and then upgrade my HTPC.
The guts got ripped out of the Dell and got replaced with an Gigabyte mATX motherboard and Athlon II X4 630 which I’ve mildly overclocked to 3.0GHz, and with the aid of a multimeter managed to reconfigure the Dell front USB port connector so it works with the Gigabyte motherboard. Currently stress testing on SIMAP and running a nice and cool 37 degrees with a Coolermaster TX3.
Now on to my HTPC…
It’s now acquired a Corsair CXM430 PSU and a ASUS A88XM-PLUS, a Coolermaster 212 EVO and 2x2GB of Kingston Hyper X 1866 DDR3… but haven’t quite made my mind up on the CPU… Might just wait until 14th January when the new AMD Kaveri core APU’s come out… I’m quite fancying the A10-7700K or maybe even a Richland core A6-6420K. That is, of course, if I can resist spending money in the next 9 days!!! :Plot:
I’m at the point now where my laptop is so old and beaten up that I am actually tempted to take the plunge and buy one now… considering mine is a good 6 years old now
I can beat that… my lappy, a Samsung Q35, is 7 year old and still battling on. It’s slightly battered, has 1 key missing and Windows Vista is slightly sluggish, but it still does it’s job and is great for taking on trips to Thailand cos of the size of its small size…
LOL… Had an email off Amazon saying the 6800K had been dispatched by Royal Mail… and after a “on-line” chat with one of their operatives about paying for premium delivery and having it sent by Royal mail and with no tracking info I managed to blag getting the delivery charge been refunded!!!
LOL… that’s twice in a week I’ve had my postage refunded off Amazon!!!
It’s funny… I work with a lad who always blows his top when he rings to complain and ends up getting nowhere… I have learned to be subtle about complaining and it seems to result in a positive outcome!
It’s laughable, opting and paying for the “premium” delivery option and end up getting a substandard cheaper “option”… The CS rep had the cheek to tell me a computer decided on the Royal Mail option as the best way of delivery. Another thing that wound me up was the order was placed at 13:00 and yet it supposedly missed the cut-off time for next day delivery and yet I’ve ordered stuff off Amazon at 23:00 and had it the next day.
I suppose I can’t grumble - after using a £15 Amazon gift certificate credit courtesy of a frequent flyer program I’m in the 6800K has effectively only cost me £90 delivered instead of £106 + delivery!!!
Well, the 6800K arrived 2 days after it was posted looking slightly squished. Not happy with the way it was packed, so had another on-line chat with a Customer Services rep and the result - a 10% discount on the item as I didn’t require a replacement sent out. Net cost of my CPU has now dropped to £80 down from £106 + postage
Got the system up and running ( running SIMAP as a burning test) and already got it clocked up to 4.6GHz on “Auto” core voltage. Going to try lowering it to see how far I can drop it and still run a decent over-clock.
these threads do make me laugh, we are a computing group were most of us have lost touch of the tech world, i’ve just got a new laptop(well second hand from DT) from an old dell vostro and my main machine is only an old athlon x2 lol, i’ve not long lost a dual core opteron machine that has been my rock for years and that was a second hand machine from curly! i’ve just got a tab 2 for christmas and can do most of my computing on that. maybe one day i might even get a smart phone that is more than a walkman and phone!
sounds like a good win there fiend
Both my crunching machines will carry on as is, no plans for upgrading them for a long time… And they are now what I would call “Old School” now… Phenom II x6 1090T’s with Asus crosshair IV’s. No intention of upgrading to the Bulldozers as they won’t perform anywhere near as well on Docking. Even my graphics cards (2x GTX670’s and 2x GTX660Ti’s) have now been superceded.
My first Phenom II X6 was a 1055T, bought in 2010, cost me £120. Sold it today on fleabay for £97… Phenom II Hex cores seem to be holding their value quite well.
I’m running Athlon X2 2.9 dual cores in my main and backup rigs and they’ve both performed well so the Hex core would be my next upgrade of choice. I’d like a Bulldozer as well and Amazon are doing a 3.6ghz FX-4100 for £99.95 which seems reasonable.
Looks good and would go well with this Gigabyte mobo as well, I definitely need the file transfer speeds of USB 3 so this board would suit just fine. Pop in 8gb DDR3 RAM and a different cooler and then be virtually good to go I reckon
I’d recommend the Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo, it’s keeping my A10-6800K pretty cool at 40 DegC running 4 SIMAP tasks clocked at 4.4GHZ and running 1.3V core voltage.
Another one I would recommend is the Xigmatek Aegir SD128264 - my 1090T’s are being cooled by these - but they are a bit more expensive than the Hyper 212 Evo’s - My 1090t’s are running at about 43 DegC on full load.
