dannyandeliza.com

I've finally become healthy again.  I was sick for over a week with the worst flu I've ever had.  With all the down time, I plotted some computer upgrades in preparation for Diablo III.  Okay maybe not for Diablo III but that's my excuse.  My computer is now sporting 24GB of ram and a massive Thermalright Silver Arrow heatsink.  The heatsink just barely fits inside Eliza's old computer case.  I have just about 1mm of clearance between the side panel and the tops of the fans!  I'm now overclocking my i7 920 from 2.6Ghz to 4.2Ghz.  Woohoo!

I think this shot gives a better idea just how big the heatsink is in what now feels like a tiny case.  The clear acrylic fan in the back is 120mm in size.  For all of the geeks out there, the Thermalright Silver Arrow heatsink fits perfectly fine on an Asus P6X58D-E motherboard.  It doesn't block any of the slots of RAM.  In fact, if you use RAM with super tall heatsinks, like Corsair Dominators or Vengeance, they will fit just fine and not touch the metal on the Silver Arrow.  However, you'll need to go into a Pull-Pull fan setup instead of a Push-Push.  I'm using G-skill Ripjaws X sticks.  While the 140mm fans will touch the tops of the ram and not allow me to close my case, using a 120mm fan similar to how a Noctua NH-D14 is configured worked out great.

The case itself is actually holding me back at this point.  It simply does not have enough airflow.  However, it's also doing a pretty good job all things considered.  Long term plan is to make a new case out of wood.  I do want to buy some odds and ends however.  Would like to pick up another set of fan clips so I can add a 120mm push fan to the heatsink and a PWM fan cable splitter so I can plug both of those big 140mm fans into the same 4 pin header.

Next big upgrade will be the videocard.  I'm going to sit and wait for a couple months to see what AMD and nVidia end up doing.  With kepler being released today and putting a serious hurt onto AMD, I'm hoping there will be a nice price war to bring prices down on the AMD 7950 or whatever nVidia releases as an encore to the new 680.

I think my next videocard has just been announced.  The XFX R7870 has 5 total ouputs.  Just enough to drive my monitors all at once.  I'd rather use a pair of MST hubs to clean up the clutter of cables, but this would do nicely...

It's been said that the best upgrade any computer that is running a conventional hard drive can get, is a current generation SSD.  And boy...  Are they right!  I picked this one up from newegg.com with a nice coupon code to bring the price to within my budget.

For the longest time I've been running with a speedy but quite old Western Digital WD740 Raptor.  It's a dinosaur and was the oldest part in my computer.  I bought it on July 14th, 2004.  It has served me faithfully day in day out.  I can only hope that this new Crucial M4 128GB SSD will do the same.

To get a sense of how much faster things have become in the past 6 years or so, I bench marked my good and faithful raptor and got the above reading.  Not great...

With no tweaks whatsoever, this is what the new drive spit out on its first try.  A few orders of magnitude faster!

And after a few keystrokes and a few reboots, we get this!  A huge bump in 4K sequential reads/writes.

Numbers aside, my computer is now quite a bit faster in reaction time.  Ah the joys of being a geek.  A few more inexpensive upgrades are up my sleeve though.  I'm thinking of getting a Broadcom crystal hd BCM970015 mini pci-e card for Eliza's laptop to help it process those compute heavy HD flash videos.  A new heatsink and more ram for my main computer wouldn't hurt either.  Oh and a fanless power supply for the HTPC!!!

But like in all things in life, my computer could be faster...  Mike's new computer with its pair of Crucial M4 128GB SSD's in RAID 0 really make me want to upgrade some more...

The weakest link in my computer has been the hard drive.  Today that all changes!  Hopefully the data transfer works and works well...