- Joined
- Mar 5, 2002
- Messages
- 20,281
- Reaction score
- 1,794
I decided to upgrade my AMD machine which is in my bedroom, used primarily for audio and video editing, trying different OS’s and Linux Distros and some gaming.
In my living room my main machine is based around an Intel i7 processor and the media machine has at it’s heart an i3 CPU. So I figured I’d maintain the AMD ‘tradition’ for my third main machine.
The reason for the upgrade was the 5.5 year old AMD build was going a bit flaky, it had shown many anomalies including one USB bus not working and it’s refusal to load several different Linux distros. There were other faults as well, it was over five years old so the Asus M2N-Sli Deluxe board had to go. The AM2 dual core AMD 3.2Ghz will find it’s way into a spare motherboard I have, currently unused.
Didn’t want to go overboard for the new build so chose a mid-priced system made up of these parts:
Asus M5A99X Evo Motherboard
AMD FX-4 4100 Black Edition 4 Core 3.6Ghz Socket AM3+ CPU
Corsair 8GB DDR3 1600MHz XMS3 Memory
And because I am using one of these in my media machine and was quite impressed with it’s quality for a ‘budget’ sound card I also ordered one of these:
Asus Xonar DG 5.1 Surround SoundCard
So here’s the parts as they arrived:
Here’s the motherboard showing what you get in the box: Board; Manual; CD; 4 SATA 3 cables; sli/crossfire link cable; rear case panel; a couple of loose cable board connectors for ease of connection
A couple more views of the motherboard:
Here’s the old setup before components removal:
I had wondered whether my Noctua cooler and fans setup I used on the old AM2 socket machine would work with this AM3+ CPU/board combo, here’s the old mounting brackets on the M2N-Sli Deluxe board:
And here are the old Noctua cooling brackets fitted to the new motherboard, looks like it’s going to fit:
And it did fit, here is the Noctua cooler mounted on the new board:
On the old motherboard one of the Noctua cooling fans overhung one of the RAM slots meaning I could only use one matched pair of memory modules but on this new board there is just enough room to use all four memory slots. I’d have to remove the fan temporarily to fit the memory module underneath but it will fit – result:
Motherboard fitted into case:
All leads connected, not too worried about tidiness or neatness, as long as it works as this case has a solid side panel, no window:
The finished tower in it’s home:
And finally this shows one of the hard disk caddies out of it’s frame. I have five of these with assorted sized hard disks. The swappable hard disks are configured as the primary drive and this makes it very easy to try different OS’s and Linux Distros:
So how is it?
First impressions are all those annoying glitches have gone, certain slow loading apps now load super fast; the machine as a whole is whole shedload faster than the board/CPU combo it replaced; it is not as fast as my i7 setup but certainly on a par with my i3 setup. This is not surprising as this system and the i3 system cost about the same. And all four front of case USB 2 ports now work.
All in all, very pleased with my new build.
It has a BFG Nvidia 512Mb GTX 9800 graphics card but I haven’t tried any games yet. I backed up my huge (around 730Gb) Steam games folder to external hard disk and then to the new build internal storage disk and then installed Steam. Every single game transferred just fine, no need for downloads to update, I was very pleased with that.
So Far I have Win 7 Ultimate 64 Bit and Win XP installed, haven’t quite finished loading everything on both. One interesting thing – My version ofLinux Mint 13 64 Bit KDE just worked straight off, the version that was used with old setup, slotted the hard disk caddy in, booted – all systems go, as they say, including the Asus Xonar sound card. Good stuff.
The sound card has a digital optical output as well as analogue and I intend to add a DAC to the system very soon. I have got the case and all associated parts and am going to order another one of These DAC boards & TX to put in it.
All cooling consists of The Noctua heatsink with a pair of 120mm fans and one rear of case Noctua 120mm fan. It runs quiet, the graphics card fan makes more noise than all 3 Noctua fans together and the CPU temp is a steady 30C, rising to 35C under heavy load.
I promised pix, so here we are, in my view a very capable mid-priced upgrade. Total parts bill including next day postage was £235.00
There were a couple of things worth mentioning, my video capture device is an external device known as a 'Dazzle' and it won't work with 64 bit systems so I'm stuck with using it with XP, and the Hauppage TV tuner card fitted into a PCI slot and as the board had only one PCI slot which had been taken up by the sound card, the TV tuner became redundant. I could have used a PCI-Express sound card I suppose but I wanted a PCI card so it was interchangeable between systems.
I bought a cheapo TV Tuner USB stick from Ebay that came with software for £13 and it works perfectly, picked up and loaded 74 channels (of which around one third were radio stations) and it even had a little remote control so that was good.
In my living room my main machine is based around an Intel i7 processor and the media machine has at it’s heart an i3 CPU. So I figured I’d maintain the AMD ‘tradition’ for my third main machine.
The reason for the upgrade was the 5.5 year old AMD build was going a bit flaky, it had shown many anomalies including one USB bus not working and it’s refusal to load several different Linux distros. There were other faults as well, it was over five years old so the Asus M2N-Sli Deluxe board had to go. The AM2 dual core AMD 3.2Ghz will find it’s way into a spare motherboard I have, currently unused.
Didn’t want to go overboard for the new build so chose a mid-priced system made up of these parts:
Asus M5A99X Evo Motherboard
AMD FX-4 4100 Black Edition 4 Core 3.6Ghz Socket AM3+ CPU
Corsair 8GB DDR3 1600MHz XMS3 Memory
And because I am using one of these in my media machine and was quite impressed with it’s quality for a ‘budget’ sound card I also ordered one of these:
Asus Xonar DG 5.1 Surround SoundCard
So here’s the parts as they arrived:
Here’s the motherboard showing what you get in the box: Board; Manual; CD; 4 SATA 3 cables; sli/crossfire link cable; rear case panel; a couple of loose cable board connectors for ease of connection
A couple more views of the motherboard:
Here’s the old setup before components removal:
I had wondered whether my Noctua cooler and fans setup I used on the old AM2 socket machine would work with this AM3+ CPU/board combo, here’s the old mounting brackets on the M2N-Sli Deluxe board:
And here are the old Noctua cooling brackets fitted to the new motherboard, looks like it’s going to fit:
And it did fit, here is the Noctua cooler mounted on the new board:
On the old motherboard one of the Noctua cooling fans overhung one of the RAM slots meaning I could only use one matched pair of memory modules but on this new board there is just enough room to use all four memory slots. I’d have to remove the fan temporarily to fit the memory module underneath but it will fit – result:
Motherboard fitted into case:
All leads connected, not too worried about tidiness or neatness, as long as it works as this case has a solid side panel, no window:
The finished tower in it’s home:
And finally this shows one of the hard disk caddies out of it’s frame. I have five of these with assorted sized hard disks. The swappable hard disks are configured as the primary drive and this makes it very easy to try different OS’s and Linux Distros:
So how is it?
First impressions are all those annoying glitches have gone, certain slow loading apps now load super fast; the machine as a whole is whole shedload faster than the board/CPU combo it replaced; it is not as fast as my i7 setup but certainly on a par with my i3 setup. This is not surprising as this system and the i3 system cost about the same. And all four front of case USB 2 ports now work.
All in all, very pleased with my new build.
It has a BFG Nvidia 512Mb GTX 9800 graphics card but I haven’t tried any games yet. I backed up my huge (around 730Gb) Steam games folder to external hard disk and then to the new build internal storage disk and then installed Steam. Every single game transferred just fine, no need for downloads to update, I was very pleased with that.
So Far I have Win 7 Ultimate 64 Bit and Win XP installed, haven’t quite finished loading everything on both. One interesting thing – My version ofLinux Mint 13 64 Bit KDE just worked straight off, the version that was used with old setup, slotted the hard disk caddy in, booted – all systems go, as they say, including the Asus Xonar sound card. Good stuff.
The sound card has a digital optical output as well as analogue and I intend to add a DAC to the system very soon. I have got the case and all associated parts and am going to order another one of These DAC boards & TX to put in it.
All cooling consists of The Noctua heatsink with a pair of 120mm fans and one rear of case Noctua 120mm fan. It runs quiet, the graphics card fan makes more noise than all 3 Noctua fans together and the CPU temp is a steady 30C, rising to 35C under heavy load.
I promised pix, so here we are, in my view a very capable mid-priced upgrade. Total parts bill including next day postage was £235.00
There were a couple of things worth mentioning, my video capture device is an external device known as a 'Dazzle' and it won't work with 64 bit systems so I'm stuck with using it with XP, and the Hauppage TV tuner card fitted into a PCI slot and as the board had only one PCI slot which had been taken up by the sound card, the TV tuner became redundant. I could have used a PCI-Express sound card I suppose but I wanted a PCI card so it was interchangeable between systems.
I bought a cheapo TV Tuner USB stick from Ebay that came with software for £13 and it works perfectly, picked up and loaded 74 channels (of which around one third were radio stations) and it even had a little remote control so that was good.
Great stuff Flops great pictures, like the CPU cooling fan, how much RAM are using?
8Gb (2 x 4Gb)
