The install/build went fine last night. I had a little trouble with the hard drives but other than that it was smooth sailing. The PSU swap went easier than I thought it would. Actually I think it worked out for the better. I had my doubts that I even needed a bigger power supply, my 500w should have been enough, but the new one I bought has 3 seperate 12v rails and much better cable sleeving than my previous unit. I was actually able to hide/flatten nearly all my cables around and behind things for a pretty clean look. I also picked up some extra long SATA cables for that very reason. Nothing is “hanging down” across the middle of the case, which is nice for a change. So, the PSU was easy, the DVD drive was easy. Even the video card was easy. When I got to the hard drives I had a little trouble and it was completely my own fault for not thinking about it. I left my primary (OS) drive and simply upgraded my storage drive. Problem was that I upgraded to an SATA storage drive, so it was on a completely seperate chain. The old IDE hard drive still had it’s jumper set to Master (if slave is present). I forgot about the “if slave is present” part and it took me about a half an hour before it dawned on me just to remove the damn jumper. After that she fired up like a champ.
The new video card more than tripled my AquaMark and 3DMark scores. I went from 34,000-something in AquaMark to an impressive 124,000. In 3DMark, which is probably a better indicator, I went from 1500 to 12,000. That’s a huge jump.
It’s a beast, it truely is. I’ve never owned a giant, double slot video card before, and this thing takes my breath away. I gave the CoD4 demo a try at 1600×1280, full settings, and it never dropped below 60fps. Now I’ve got to get my hands on a game or two to really give it a run for it’s money. That, and go back and play some older games at the resolutions they were meant to be played at. HL2 at 2048 x whatever it is.
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