- or - "How to make money disappear"
03/27/02
I've been having issues with my computer.
Well, more than just simple issues. I've been watching my motherboard die a slow and painful death for about the last 3 months. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of the suffering and ordered a replacement board.
No, it wasn't enough to simply replace it with the same thing that I had... I have to think about the future here! So... I went for the latest thing, something with upgrade potential, something beefy. I settled on the iWill XP333-R.
Sure... I currently don't use RAID, and I don't foresee using it any time soon, but damn it... if I'm going to buy a new motherboard, it's gonna have all the bells and whistles! Of course, this meant replacing my memory too, since my current RAM is PC-133. So... I got 512 meg of Crucial PC-2100 (that's DDR memory for those who aren't geeks).
With my new motherboard and memory in hand, I was happy.... mostly.
You see... my old processor, an AMD Thunderbird 800mHz, just wouldn't run at the speeds that the new memory could... and this just had to be rectified! So, after holding off for two agonizing weeks, I broke down and ordered a new AMD XP 2000+ and Swiftech MCX462 cooling fan.
This opened a new can of worms.
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The Swiftech is an amazing cooling solution. Slap 20oz. of copper and aluminum under an
80mm case fan and make it so you have to physically bolt it through the motherboard
(instead of to the socket), and you've got this monster.
Pure cooling genius! Of course, with the size of this heat sink and fan, it would no longer fit in my old in-Win A500 case (because of the positioning of the power supply). This led to the purchase of an Antec SX830 Workstation case from BestBuy (as I had everything else and was ready to go). |
 The Monster Lives! |