I still not well but possibly getting better, three weeks tomorrow this thing will have run so far. The past seven days have been amongst the most scary of my life, 4am, alone, dark, suffocating, trembling and feeling very sorry for myself, lol Not getting quite so many breathless coughing fits now but far from out of the woods yet. Finished antibiotics today, didn't make any difference, still producing infected mucus. I possibly should extend course but GP's not open til Monday now (prescription).
Fairly recently I have started two or three threads about upgrading. A few days ago my hand was forced which I'm still not sure is a good thing or a bad thing. I thought I'd go for modest graphics card upgrade, an Nvidia 560 for £145.00 which I thought would be a slight improvement on my GTX9800, double the memory and bring me up to DX11.
So I got this one:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-...pu-850mhz-shader-1700mhz-336-cores-plusfree-b
On same order I got a pair of 2.1 loudspeakers which I can report are really very very good, these ones:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/cors...er-system-big-gaming-sound-in-a-small-package
Fitted video card, plugged in mains lead to computer, attached monitor, mouse and when I attached Saitek Eclipse keyboard USB lead I noticed there was a sparking and the backlight to the keys flickered and went out, they're normally on all the time. Didn't think anything of it but when I switched computer on it wouldn't POST.
To cut a long story short I ended up with motherboard outside case with nothing attached except keyboard, mouse & monitor and by a series of deductions figured motherboard was fried
Almost five years old, has served me well that Asus P5B deluxe.
So, ignoring most all of advice I'd received in my 'upgrade' threads, I chose a system, this is it:
Motherboard
CPU
CPU Cooler
Memory
Hard Disk
And as I had the pox with the Saitek keyboard I also ordered a replacement for it:
Keyboard
I've built the thing, had to activate Win 7 by phone, and it's running right now.
Here's a Speccy screen grab:
Notes:
I would not have upgraded had my old system not failed, yes, it was a lot of money but hell, I did really want to upgrade and if I'm lucky this'll do me another five years. I spend most of my leisure time on the PC, gaming or otherwise, so to me it's a good investment.
The Noctua cooler is giving me 33C on CPU, it's huge and because of it's size I cannot use one memory slot or fit 120mm side case fan.
I'm a little concerned that Speccy thinks my SSD drive is an IDE device and is running at 128C. It's not on both counts, it feels cool to the touch and has a front of case 120mm fan blowing directly on it. Odd.
So how does it perform?
Overall, it really isn't a lot faster than my Core Duo system with a pair of Raptors in RAID 0 but it is - a little. It
does boot a little quicker as well.
Where it excels is games. Whether this is the graphics card, the new system or a combo of both I don't know but my oh my, games are superb. They faster, sharper, more vibrant, hell, even the sound sounds better (still using the Auzentech Prelude X-Fi).
On the few games I've tried so far they are simply more immersive.
Thinking about it, all I have left of old system is Case, PSU and sound card. Both my optical drives had been going flakey for several months, neither of them would even read the Asus motherboard DVD at all, so I replaced both of them.
I love the new look BIOS.
I was actually determined to get a Gigabyte board for this build but after a lot of searching the Asus range seriously offered a whole lot more for the money. Looked briefly at Asrock as well but.... nope
As I couldn't recover my Win 7 install from the RAID 0 setup (and no, I didn't back it up - grrrrr) I have lost a lot of bookmarks and a lot of saved games. C'est la vie. My Steam folder was on a secondary hard disk, I logged on to Steam and installed the Steam client to my existing Steam folder and the whole thing was reinstated perfectly. Steam is seriously good shiznit
I had a problem reactivating Alice: Madness returns with EA cos they were convinced mine was a pirate copy, had to get on chat helpline and scan the manual and DVD before they would issue another serial number. I don't like EA, they can get stuffed and poke Origin where the sun don't shine - Steam roolz
I have most stuff reinstalled, now just going through games, have installed Witcher and luckily I had saved CoD4 & CoD5 profiles.
So, I'm now all up to date until.... well, about ten minutes ago, probably