Back In Action, Well Sort Of.

I received all of my computer hardware from New Egg on Friday after paying for rush processing and next day air shipping. It was in fact my motherboard that had failed. This is a really easy fix if you are just swapping out an exact replica of your current board, but of course that is not the case for me. I have been getting ready to upgrade for several months now because my old system was just getting too slow. I decided that I might as well start now, but scaled back some of my upgrade plans because of product availability and the cost of my desired Intel processor.

The first upgrade was of course the motherboard. My old board was from ASUS and it was my second board that I have owned from them that failed me. I decided that I would try another company this time around. I choose the new EVGA nForce 780i SLI. This is my first time using any EVGA products and so far I am happy. Things have really changed over the last few years and that is very evident with this new board. There have been a lot of speed and aesthetic improvements. My EVGA board is well laid out and a true speed demon.

My new processor is an Intel Duo Core E8400. These chips just came out last month and are a great bargain for their performance. I have used all AMD chips in the past, but Intel is just spanking their butt. This is not the original chip that I wanted to buy, but because I needed it so fast I went with a cheaper alternative than the Intel QX9650. This new chip just blows away the old AMD FX-57 chip I was running. It is faster, uses less power and runs much cooler.

I also wanted to change up the CPU cooler as well and got lucky to get a Xigmatek HDT-S1283 tower cooler. This is also a very new cooler and I am amazed at the performance compared with my previous cooler. It is huge though and definitely requires a big PC case to fit.

The last upgrade I decided on for now was to add some new RAM memory to take advantage of the speed my new mother board offers. I ended up going with 2GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR2. DDR3 memory is the newest kind out, but it is very expensive and not worth the cost at this time. My motherboard can only use DDR2 memory anyway.