Going Black continued

The new CPU and motherboard are installed in the giant purple case and running well. The main problems were fitting all the devices and cables into the large case. It is still a tight fit.

The MSI K9A2 Neo-F AM2+ motherboard is great. It allows me to use my old Enermax 650W power supply to connect with a 20 pin connection into the newer 24 pin motherboard. Even the manual says that you can do this. It also POSTed first time with the new CPU and an easy BIOS upgrade with MSI's LiveUpdate program gives the correct AMD Phenom II X3 720 CPU name.

I loaded Windows Vista Home Premium and all the hardware was recognised. Even my Sil 0680 IDE RAID card! Then it was an easy job to gradually increase the CPU multiplier setting from 14X to 16X to reach my desired overclocking speed of 3.2Ghz. The system runs fine and I'm reloading my games and applications before benchmarking. I'm very happy with this upgrade.

Going Black

Even after my December post, I've decided to rebuild an old DIY computer as my next gaming system. At present I use an 18 month old DELL Inspiron 530 with Intel C2D E6550 2.33Ghz and 3Gb PC5300 memory. I want a noticeable performance improvement going up into the 3Ghz CPU range plus overclocking capabilities.

Also, though quad core processors are the high end CPU of today, I've sold a few Intel C2Q Q6600 and Q8200-based systems for gaming and I've never been totally impressed with the response times, even though more modern games are multiprocessor compatible. As always, cost is an issue, and needs to be kept as low as possible. Obvious candidates were Intel C2D E8400 and Q8X00, Q9X00 and Core i7 together with the new AMD Phenom II X4 CPUs. However I've decided on the triple core AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition for the following reasons:

• a modern true 2.8Ghz multicore processor
• 45nm fabrication leading to lower power (95W) and temperatures
• unlocked multiplier; easier to overclock without stressing memory and graphics
• the AM3 socket format giving an upgrade path to DDR3 memory
• that extra core processor
• the under £120 low price

I've also bought an MSI K9A2 Neo-F AM2+ motherboard for £60. This is an ATX format, compatible with the Phenom II CPUs and offering four DDR2 memory slots and no integrated graphics. This gives me RAM configuration flexibility as well as RAID storage and I will be transferring my XFX overclocked nVidia 9600GSO graphics card.

This will all be assembled into my very large, metallic purple Cheiftec case with existing quality PSU, DVD drives and a new WD 500Gb SATA2 hard disk drive. This presently houses an AMD Duron 1.8Ghz CPU and Abit NF7 motherboard.

I'm looking forward to receiving my new CPU and motherboard later this week. I'll let you know how I get on with them.