Moving from AMD to Intel - New PC build story


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In the G4 days, quite a few of the forum members helped me put together a parts lists for my first computer build. It ended up being an AMD socket 939 system (Asus A8N SLI-Deluxe, AMD Athlon 3500+ CPU, 2x512MB DDR XMS Corsair RAM, ATi Radeon X800XL, etc.) which I was very proud to put together. However, as time passed and through OS/application upgrades, the old rig was finding it difficult to keep up. A few minor upgrades followed such as a better aftermarket HSF, an Opteron dual-core processor, 3GB XMS Corsair RAM, SATA HDD, a new PCP&C Silencer PSU and eVGA nVidia GeForce GTX 460, but I felt that the speed of socket 939 was holding back on maximum performance.

 

Anyway, a sign that I needed to move on came in the form of a message on boot one day: "Boot failure. Unable to boot to hard disk". I changed SATA cables and switched to new ports, but got the same message. Attaching the drive as an external disk to my laptop showed that nothing was wrong with the disk itself; data was accessible. I took the scenario as meaning that the SATA ports were damaged and hoped that the other parts were still salvageable. But replacing a socket 939 motherboard would cost as much or even more than a new system.

 

I have always been impressed with Intel's CPUs so decided to switch to an Intel build. If I replaced the motherboard, then I'd also need to replace the CPU and RAM. I could reuse the other components. TomsHardware.com's monthly PC builds was my inspiration for choosing the following combo:

  • CPU - Intel Core i5-3470 (Ivy Bridge 3.2GHz)
  • Motherboard - ASRock Z75 Pro3 LGA 1155
  • RAM - Team Vulcan 2x 4GB DDR3-1600

Got a good deal on those parts from Newegg. When the parts arrived, I gutted the old components and quickly installed the new parts. It's amazing how I still knew what to do after all these years.

 

In addition to the above, I have also added a new Western Digital Blue 1TB 7200RPM (SATA 6Gbps) HDD and Sandisk 32GB ReadyCache which can take full advantage of the SATA 6Gpbs speed. Upgrading to a proper SSD is planned for the future, but as it stands now, this system is 100 times better than what it was before!

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I also had a socket 939 based system, but I upgraded it in 2011. It was actually an issue of looking into upgrading the video card for DX11 support that caused me to build a new system. I went with an i3-2500k cpu (Sandy bridge), an Asrock Z68-pro3 motherboard and Gskill ram.

 

I have actually built more boxes than this one as I have different ones for different things, but this particular one is the all around general use, gaming, whatever box.

I have aready upgrade the video card twice in this thing and it looks like I may be looking at doing that again here in the near future with DX12 coming into the picture.

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