I just acquired a new motherboard for £50 to kick-start the upgrading of the PC to something faster. My current motherboard is getting on a bit now, it’s now four years old, and I have reached the limit of its upgradeability. So in comes the shiny new Sapphire PC-A9RD480Adv, which is a significant upgrade to my current motherboard. The downside is that I can’t use my new X1600 graphics card as its AGP based, and the new motherboard is PCIe, although it has two PCIe x16 slots, so I can run in SLI mode or Crossfire as ATI calls it, so I’ll eventually get two X1600s in there, that should fly along. Another downside is that I will have to lose 512MB of RAM as I need identical DIMMs to run in dual channel mode. So for the time being I’ll only have the two 1GB DIMMs, which I will upgrade to a further two 1GB DIMMs later to give me a total of 4GB running in dual channel mode. On the processor front I was thinking about getting an Athlon 3700+ which offers a good performance/price ratio, and is almost double the speed of my current processor. I am looking to spend about £300 on this lot, and later maybe add a couple of decent sized SATA drives to the system, should make a huge difference to my computing life, it’s just a shame that there’s not a lot of support for 64bit processors at the moment, so I wont see the full realisation of the CPU’s power until that happens, which I hope will be very soon as I am finally taking the plunge!
This morning I woke up in extreme back pain, and when I rolled over I realised why! My air mattress that I had bought as a temporary measure when I move in here had sprung a leak. I found myself sleeping pretty much on the wooden slats of the bed, which isn’t very comfortable I can tell you that! So had to go out and buy another mattress, this time a better one, costing me £40 + £5 for batteries to inflate the thing, and you can tell the difference, its much firmer and sits properly on the bed between the wooden frame rather than sitting on one side of the frame; which is one of the reasons it started leaking I think!