g__day
25-03-2007, 02:12 AM
I thought I'd write a mini-review of a upgrade that has pleased me immensely recently, its about the main Desktop PC gear I use around my home and to drive my scope. Althought not the highest performer its incredible value, especially if you are upgrading and want to re-use many parts.
The heart of this upgrade is an ASRock Dual Vista motherboard with a Intel Conroe E6400 Dual Core CPU with a stock standard supplied heat sink and cooler.
This bit of gear has three big things going for it:
1). The motherboard is under $80 and the CPU around the $280 - $330 mark, and this CPU (or its cheaper cousin the E6300) overclocks readily from around 2.16 GHz to around 3GHz
2). Its operation is whisper quiet, rock solid and the CPU stays quite cool with a default heatsink fan (around 40 degrees indoors)
3). Versatility - it takes a range of old and new socket 775 CPUs, it takes either DDR 1 or DDR2 and it takes either a AGP and PCI-express graphics card
So you can keep your case, power supply, IDE DVD / CD drive, IDE or SATA hard drives (two of each), older or newer memory and older or newer graphics card, and it has integrated sound and 10/100 Mbit/sec LAN, so its a low cost platform change, that can go on for quite awhile, and bridges nicely between old and new.
I bought three of these combo's - it took about 2 hours per change (given cleaning and changing a really old PSU or two) and re-loading the O/s on one very old rig. Now as to performamve well changing over from a Athlon 2800 XP is where I notice the biggest differentce. Being dual CPU core the rig now seems to be consistently faster - even under heavy usage. Everything just seems to fly. Even compared to my Athlon 64 3000 rig this is just faster - all the time, no halts or churns whilst the virus scanner is going or I'm buring a DVD. And this new Intel core runs whisper quite and very cool.
So in my upgrades for three rigs really only the CPU and motherboard have changed. I keep my AGP graphics card, my memory and all my PCI expansion cards. And when I installed, it saw my RAID striped array first go, and it didn't require a re-load fo Windows XP - I just booted, installed the ASRock cd and loaded the drivers and everything worked perfectly.
Its a mid- low range board, but is not sluggishs and would fly if overclocked, and its tonnes of Omph for runing CS Photoshope and ruip a CD whilst you;re waiting!
All up I'd give it 8.5 out of ten! Well done ASRock.
The heart of this upgrade is an ASRock Dual Vista motherboard with a Intel Conroe E6400 Dual Core CPU with a stock standard supplied heat sink and cooler.
This bit of gear has three big things going for it:
1). The motherboard is under $80 and the CPU around the $280 - $330 mark, and this CPU (or its cheaper cousin the E6300) overclocks readily from around 2.16 GHz to around 3GHz
2). Its operation is whisper quiet, rock solid and the CPU stays quite cool with a default heatsink fan (around 40 degrees indoors)
3). Versatility - it takes a range of old and new socket 775 CPUs, it takes either DDR 1 or DDR2 and it takes either a AGP and PCI-express graphics card
So you can keep your case, power supply, IDE DVD / CD drive, IDE or SATA hard drives (two of each), older or newer memory and older or newer graphics card, and it has integrated sound and 10/100 Mbit/sec LAN, so its a low cost platform change, that can go on for quite awhile, and bridges nicely between old and new.
I bought three of these combo's - it took about 2 hours per change (given cleaning and changing a really old PSU or two) and re-loading the O/s on one very old rig. Now as to performamve well changing over from a Athlon 2800 XP is where I notice the biggest differentce. Being dual CPU core the rig now seems to be consistently faster - even under heavy usage. Everything just seems to fly. Even compared to my Athlon 64 3000 rig this is just faster - all the time, no halts or churns whilst the virus scanner is going or I'm buring a DVD. And this new Intel core runs whisper quite and very cool.
So in my upgrades for three rigs really only the CPU and motherboard have changed. I keep my AGP graphics card, my memory and all my PCI expansion cards. And when I installed, it saw my RAID striped array first go, and it didn't require a re-load fo Windows XP - I just booted, installed the ASRock cd and loaded the drivers and everything worked perfectly.
Its a mid- low range board, but is not sluggishs and would fly if overclocked, and its tonnes of Omph for runing CS Photoshope and ruip a CD whilst you;re waiting!
All up I'd give it 8.5 out of ten! Well done ASRock.