More Cubes, More HP, But Why?

The computer rebuild is over. The old box now contains a new AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2 GHz Socket AM3 Quad-core microprocessor. Wow, that’s a mouthful. What it means is it is state of the art (SOTA) for about a week or so… and impressive to computer geeks.

The amazing part of the rebuild (required because of the lightning damage) is the $650 cost is far less than the cost of the original build three years ago. The only parts kept from the old machine are the case and fans, the video card, and three of the four original drives. The parts rebuild went fine. The data recovery with the failing drive was horrendous. It was the C: drive in the 64 bit mode. Lucky I could drop into the 32 bit system and grab data from the failing drive.

Even the Vista OS was balking when re-registering because the new hardware made it look like a new install on a new computer. I did find the way to solve that problem.

End result is I am state of the art again with double the horsepower but the end user effect is barely noticeable. The quad processor does get a work out on all four CPU’s, but the old system was no slouch either. I expect to see and experience a noticeable improvement out on the track (no street racing) when I do some video editing and when doing a lot of multi-tasking.

The important part is I have my lightning damaged system totally repaired. So why not step up three more years SOTA in hardware when the cost is far less than the original parts. The net result in my opinion is, the non gamer or non over clocker (the office commuter) will never hear the deep throated rumble under the hood. The new box is what we called a “sleeper” in my day… 🙂