Newish PC

I bought new stuff for the PC on Thursday!

1Gb RAM, Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4 AM2 socket board, AMD Sempron 3000+ proc, new case with 500 watts and an NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT PCI-e graphics card.

The board is SLI ready! And so is the graphics card. Therefore, I can stick TWO GeForce 7300GTs in my machine if I'm so inclined.

The board was (rather enthusiastically) recommended by the sales guy. I'm quite impressed with the board's other features. It includes on board Firewire and network interface. Very convenient. The thing that really attracted me to it though was the fact that unlike many other SATA capable main boards, this one includes a full featured PATA IDE controller. That means I can use all my old hard drives and DVD writer plus SATA hard drives in the future. I think this is a nice feature.

So far so good. The new system is as stable as a rock and quite surprisingly, doesn't generate as much heat as my previous AMD Athlon XP 2200+ processor.

Now my old stuff is sitting in my dad's old casing, fully configured and running. Finally, we have TWO PCs with decent power in the house. Our old Duron 600 is finally retired after nearly a decade of service.

Or has it?

I noticed that I have enough junk parts to use back on the "retired" hardware and set up a THIRD PC. In fact, all it needs is keyboard/mouse, a monitor, a wireless LAN card and some kind of optical drive. It so happens that I'm planning to buy an LCD monitor and SATA hard disk within the next 2 months...

My brother asked me about it yesterday and I've decided to go for it. So the new LCD monitor replaces my 17" Samsung monitor, my monitor will replace our relic 14" monitor and that will be used by my brother. Three PCs in our very own home network. And, my youngest brother's P4 is still in KL.

All these new computer projects is making me giddy with excitement.

In other news, my Need For Speed Carbon arrived on Thursday too. It's bloody brilliant. There's a lot I can write about it so I'll do a post on it some time next week probably. I'll probably throw in some thoughts on the new graphics card too. All I can say about it now is that it's very powerful for something considered "mid-range".

Alright then, back to the canyons!