On friday night, I brought my PC over to my buddy Nettles house & upgraded the box. We put in the Intel Quad Core CPU/mobo along with the 4G RAM & 150 G Raptor X hdd (I bought the hdd & ram last year but didn't have time to do anything with it because of time-consuming grad school).
The old PC had an 80G hdd in it that was split into a C & D partition...for the past 5 years I thought I was using 2 hdds! Boy did I feel stupid. I also found that my vidoe card was using the ancient AGP connection, not PCI express. My bad, once again. What we did was put the C drive from the old hdd onto the Raptor & kept the D drive in its own partition. We reformatted the old partition which as become the "F" drive. However, with Partition Tragic, I'll be eventually making the entire old hard drive its own D drive.
The end result will be a C drive Raptor X and a D drive (old 80G EIDE hdd). The eventual plan is to replace the 80G EIDE drive with a 500G SATA drive sometime in the near future. I skimped on buying a new hdd right away so I could save a few bucks on the upgrade cost.
Further, since my old video card was an ATI X800 AGP video card, I had to replace that. New mobos don't have AGP. So I got a $27 ATI videocard from Nettles for the time being. New ATI video cards are out in August, so I figured I would need to wait to upgrade that. Also, I was informed that I might need to replace my Enermax power supply with a power supply with more wattage to handle a high end video card.
To protect my Raptor X, I've ordered an hdd cooler. I'm really disappointed in the high price. About $38 after including the $8 shipping & handling! No stores around my area carry the Syntrin & those look the best. Finally, I've come to the conclusion that my 5 year old case sucks. It's very bland & beige. I might go ahead & buy a new case from Newegg as well. They have a gamer case (black) for $70-80 after a $40 rebate.
Well, I think I'll wait until I switch energy providers. I'm getting raped by my electric company so I might have to get the power turned off until I can get switched over to a better provider. I can't believe how ridiculous these electric bills are.
