Yeah, I believe my hardware friend activated the Raid controller (not
sure of the details) to use the 120 GB HDD. I had to get a new PSU
because it didn't have enouh juice due to the HDD AND the video card.
Sheesh.
Hehe, yup. On the upside, that new power supply should be sufficient
for your new system. If you hadn't upgraded previously you probably
would have needed to upgrade for this CPU upgrade.
Yeah, that is why I am thinking of getting an older motherboard like
754 so drivers do exist. Also, helps ot determine what is stable out
there and save money. I do NOT need the latest and newest stuff!
Even the older Socket 754 stuff could well be a bit weak on SATA
driver support in Linux. Generally speaking this has been very slow
to be implemented properly.
How about comparing to the Athlon XP?
Tough call. AMD changed the way that they report power consumption on
their chips with the Athlon64 line. Previously they had listed a
maximum power consumption for each individual processor with the
AthlonXP. With the new Athlon64s they are just listing a maximum
power consumption for the entire line (ie "if your system meets these
specs you can use ANY Athlon64 built on a 130nm process"). So as a
result the lowly Athlon64 2800+ is listed with the same power
consumption as the as-yet-unreleased Athlon64 FX 55, despite the fact
that the latter consumes quite a bit more power.
In the end though, from what I've seen the Athlon64 2800+ will
probably have about the same maximum power consumption as your
AthlonXP 2200+ while also having lower power consumption when not
going flat-out. Going to faster Athlon64's might increase your
maximum power consumption by a bit, but probably not a big change over
what you have now, and the "Cool 'n Quiet" technology will help to
keep the idle and light processing power consumption down.