LA_MERC_FragFood
February 18th, 2010, 12:08 AM
The aftermath of my homebrew Tivo melting down. Looked and looked for a Socket 939 motherboard. Hard (like impossible) to find except on Fleabay. Not going that route. SO after much hemming and hawing about, I decided to recycle as much as I could (not much) and rebuild with more modern stuff.
I Kept:
- Boot and data hard drives
- Case and good PSU
- Optical drive
- Tuner cards
New stuff (which I really can't believe was this cheap, considering the upgrade it turned out to be):
- Motherboard - Gigabyte Socket AM3 with onboard (gasp!) ATI HD4200 graphics (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128394)
- Processor - AMD Athlon II x2 Socket AM3 65W (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103688)
- RAM - 2x 1GB G.Skill DDR2/1066 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231144)
That's it. I've really gotten fond of the Gigabyte mobos, and have one in my gaming rig. They seem really solid. Athlon II x2 blows my old 3000+ outta the water, both bandwidth and clock speed wise (1x1.8Ghz vs. 2x2.8Ghz and DDR2 RAM vs. DDR) The Gigabyte motherboard also supports "Hybrid Crossfire" where you can add a second card to the PCI-e slot and it auto Crossfires for you. Kinda neat. But only if you're running Vista, so it's not like I'll use it. The onboard 4200HD has hardware decoding for HD, an HDMI port and a built in TOSLink port on the back for all my audio needs.
Not bad for $169 delivered for everything. I think my multimedia needs will be covered for a while, but have room for expansion if I need it - up to a quad core and 16GB of RAM if the need arises.
I Kept:
- Boot and data hard drives
- Case and good PSU
- Optical drive
- Tuner cards
New stuff (which I really can't believe was this cheap, considering the upgrade it turned out to be):
- Motherboard - Gigabyte Socket AM3 with onboard (gasp!) ATI HD4200 graphics (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128394)
- Processor - AMD Athlon II x2 Socket AM3 65W (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103688)
- RAM - 2x 1GB G.Skill DDR2/1066 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231144)
That's it. I've really gotten fond of the Gigabyte mobos, and have one in my gaming rig. They seem really solid. Athlon II x2 blows my old 3000+ outta the water, both bandwidth and clock speed wise (1x1.8Ghz vs. 2x2.8Ghz and DDR2 RAM vs. DDR) The Gigabyte motherboard also supports "Hybrid Crossfire" where you can add a second card to the PCI-e slot and it auto Crossfires for you. Kinda neat. But only if you're running Vista, so it's not like I'll use it. The onboard 4200HD has hardware decoding for HD, an HDMI port and a built in TOSLink port on the back for all my audio needs.
Not bad for $169 delivered for everything. I think my multimedia needs will be covered for a while, but have room for expansion if I need it - up to a quad core and 16GB of RAM if the need arises.