Hardware Upgrade Complete

Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged to the masses. No I haven’t died, I’ve just been really busy. Stuff on my to-do list includes getting out a new podcast and comic, enjoying a much-needed vacation, and writing up more articles like the EON review series.

To kick all of that off, essentially a pre-req for all of that, my PC was in dire need of an upgrade.

First off, specs time:

• Power supply: Corsair HX 850W Power Supply w/ 140mm Fan
• Motherboard: Asus P7H55D-M EVO w/ DualDDR3 1333, 7.1 Audio, Gigabit Lan, USB3.0. 1394, PCI-E x16, HDMI
• CPU: Intel Core™ i5 Processor 750 2.66GHz w/ 8MB Cache
• Memory: Corsair 4GB XMS3-1333 TWIN3X Dual Channel DDR3 Kit (2 x 2GB)
• Video: Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB GDDR5
• Boot drive: Intel X25-M Mainstream 34nm 2.5in SATA II Solid State Drive, 80GB (OEM)
• Secondary drive: Western Digital 1.5TB Caviar Green 5400rpm SATA II w/ 64MB Cache
• Disc: Samsung SH-B083L 8x BD-ROM / DVD Writer Combo Drive
• OS: Windows 7

There’s some additional drives in there from my previous PC adding another two terabytes of storage to this.

Going with Windows 7 and a SSD for a boot (and EVE) drive ends up being a fantastic thing to do, and I can’t recommend it enough. The OS’s speed is insane, and everything’s whisper quiet. So much so that when I touch any of the data drives (where I’m installing pretty much everything else)  it’s immediately noticeable how quiet everything is.

It’s nice having a rig where I don’t have to run Battlefield: Bad Company 2 multiplayer on the lowest settings in order to not have the game lag like crazy. It’s also awesome to have EVE run like it’s built on an Astroglide-based architecture.

Check out the rest of the build pics in the Hardware set at my Flickr.  Enjoy, and if anyone’s considering an upgrade feel free to give me a shout and I might be able to provide some tips.