Singapore Web DesignerEquipment Upgrade » AEN—Designer & Consultant

My graphics card died on me last Tuesday. The 3-year-old Gigabyte Maya Radeon 9000 had served me well and performed its duties responsibly until last Tuesday morning when it showed signs of passing away. My monitor would remain black after I switched off the screen for a few hours unless I reboot my PC. After while the problem comes back. In the late morning, it finally gave up and gave me a Blue Screen of Death immediately POST (Power On Self Test) and I could boot into Windows at all.

I resorted to switching over to my original onboard graphics but it sucked big time. I’m running 1600×1200 high resolution, 32 bits true color and it could only support a 60 MHz refresh rate. Whenever I do something like drag a window or do any graphics-intensive work, the screen flickers and colors aren’t displayed correctly. My desktop icons have strange white borders which are a result of poor anti-aliasing.

I had no choice but to spend on new hardware. Since the card was really obsolete, I reckoned I might as well take this opportunity to upgrade most of my system. That includes a new graphics card, motherboard, memory upgrade and a new processor. Here’s my workstation setup before the upgrade:

Motherboard: Asus P4S533-VM (Micro-ATX form-factor)
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz (Overclocked to 1.93 GHz) (Socket-478 Williamette Core)
Memory: 768MB (512MB + 256MB) Kingston ValueRam 266MHz
Graphics: Gigabyte Maya Radeon 9000 (AGP 4x 128MB)

And here’s what I have after the upgrade:

Motherboard: Asus P5VD2-X (ATX form-factor)
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz (Overclocked to 3.24GHz) Model No. 631 (LGA-775 Cedar Mill Core)
Memory: 1GB Kingston ValueRam 533MHz
Graphics: Eagle Nvidia GeForce 7100 GS (PCI-Express 256MB)

I still have 1 more DIMM slot so I’ll probably get a 1 or 2GB stick to end up with 2 or 3GB total memory for high resolution print work. The CPU is an excellent component and being at 3GHz+, I can perform Photoshop filters, export files and compile Flash movies a lightning speed compared to the old CPU. I’m currently running Photoshop CS3 Beta and it’s an absolute joy to use.

I chose the older single-core Pentium 4 over the newer Dual Core Pentium D because a fast single-core is more suited for the kind of work I’m doing. Dual cores are more for entertainment and multi-tasking, e.g. playing music while playing an online game with Bittorrent downloading movies all at the same time. For me, I only work on 1 or 2 programs at any 1 time so single-core is for me. The 631 Pentium 4 is also the exact processor which a group of Italian overclockers called OC Team used to break the overcloking records at 8GHz. It must be a really good CPU then.

Actually the Pentium 4 was upgraded on Saturday (yesterday). prior to the P4, i bought and used a Intel Celeron D 2.66GHz Model No. 331. The cheap entry-level processor was unfortunately too weaked, though it had a higher clock speed of 2.66GHz than the old P4’s 1.7GHz, it was noticeably slower and less responsive. For example, opening a new tab on Firefox took more than 5 seconds! it was probably due to the smaller L2 Cache.

I’m currently putting up the old Asus P4S533-VM motherboard and Pentium 4 1.7GHz CPU, Cooler master X Dream III Heastsink Fan and the Intel Celeron D 2.66GHz CPU on auction on eBay Singapore. Feel free to visit these links if you are interested in getting a good deal for these not-too-old but working fine PC components.