From your friends at the Empire, here’s to wishing you a happy Easter!
Fantastic News
More than you ever wanted to know about my new motherboard, CPU, and ram.
Last time I posted, I was lamenting over my computer situation. I lament no more! I have a tablet, and it helped feed my addiction to the Internetz, but it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles as a full blown computer. Tapping and scrolling are okay for simple, mindless surfing, but for anything more than that… *pulls at hair*
I had a lot of help from my comrade in arms getting all of this installed. I learned a hell of a lot about installation! I ended up deciding to replace the essentials. For less than $400, I have a working computer that is twice as powerful as my old one. I had to give in because I need a computer!
My review of everything is posted below. If anything changes, I’ll make an update. So far I give everything 5/5 happy computers.
I’m still trying to find Photoshop. I found an ancient Photoshop disc from from the early 2000s (possibly earlier!). I want to do some more searching before I install my retro copy. 😉
CPU: Intel core i5-4460 (quad core!)
I could have gone for a beautiful (yet pricey) i7, but I am not running any virtual servers or dummy terminals, and I highly doubt Lord of the Rings Online needs an i7, ha ha! So far this little chip is awesome. I was terrified of installing it (my comrade in arms did the installation and showed me how to do it). It’s not so scary after all because it’s mostly a matter of “the round peg goes in the round hole; the square box goes in the square hole!” You just put a dab of the thermal past onto the heat sink and install the fan.
Motherboard: ASRock z97 Pro 4
My old motherboard was about ten years old. I had to get new ram (DDR3) to accommodate it. Eventually I will get a new video card (thankfully it has a regular PCI slot). It is a little smaller than the old one, but it still fits in my case beautifully.
I just want to rave about and praise how lovely the bios looks and how easy it was to install the drivers from the disc that came with it. The bios is more advanced than any bios I had seen before. You can navigate with your mouse, and the graphics are a step up from the old blue and white standard.
The driver disc came with a tool set that allows you to easily monitor the temperature of your CPU (among other things). FYI: you want your CPU to stay below 50 degrees Celsius (this is important if you do a lot of gaming or video/photo editing). It also came with Chrome. I am the queen of lazy. With the click of a few buttons, I had all the drivers, the tool set, and Chrome installed.
Oh, and the Operating System install? Within 30 minutes, it was up and running!
Ram: Two 4gig sticks of GSkill DDR3
It’s ram…It’s fast. It does what ram does and fits in the DDR3 slots. 😛
There you have it, more than you ever wanted to know about my new computer setup. I will shed tears when the credit card bill comes, but it was all worth it!
