So I've finally upgraded my rig.
My home computer was starting to die it's death. It serviced my utilitarian needs just fine but for the odd game I played on it, well it was far from functional. So it was time to upgrade. However this is a stop gap and I'm actually going to pick up a Mac in the future. But I couldn't wait and took advantage of some dealer pull I head.
First the Mobo: Asus P5VDC-MX. Now this is a fairly decent middle of the road 775 intel board. It's perfect for my cross over because not only does it support DDR2, sata and up to 800fsb it also has support for EIDE, agp and DDR ram. This means I can do a great piece build and use everything (sans PCU) from my current build. I can then piece build it up as prices drop.
For the chip I got a PentiumD 805 (2.66ghz dual core no Hyper Threading). Not a power house chip for gaming, but since gaming isn't my main goal it will suffice. Plus my last chip was 1.6ghz Athalon so this will still give me a significant gaming boost. But it is dual core which means that I can run multiple apps well which is a much bigger advantage for me then pure speed.
Total price for mobo and chip $200cdn -
So I can drop that into my current rig and be back up and going with no additional cost. Down the road depending on how long I hold off on the Mac I can throw in some DDR2 ram and that'll take a huge advantage and give me a nice speed boost over my current DDR. I'm also probably going to put in a PCI-X Nvidia 6600gt card in the next couple of weeks as my current AGP card is dog slow.
I'm planning on fully testing this dual core chip so first experiment is to install Vmware ESX server and see how well it handles near hardware level virtualization. The goal being using Ubuntu for my primary desktop needs and also having an XP os installed and stripped down for gaming. Oh also the chip is 64bit so it'll be XP64pro and Ubuntu64 to see how they work. If Vmware is still to big of a pig then I'll go to dual boot mode.
First the Mobo: Asus P5VDC-MX. Now this is a fairly decent middle of the road 775 intel board. It's perfect for my cross over because not only does it support DDR2, sata and up to 800fsb it also has support for EIDE, agp and DDR ram. This means I can do a great piece build and use everything (sans PCU) from my current build. I can then piece build it up as prices drop.
For the chip I got a PentiumD 805 (2.66ghz dual core no Hyper Threading). Not a power house chip for gaming, but since gaming isn't my main goal it will suffice. Plus my last chip was 1.6ghz Athalon so this will still give me a significant gaming boost. But it is dual core which means that I can run multiple apps well which is a much bigger advantage for me then pure speed.
Total price for mobo and chip $200cdn -
So I can drop that into my current rig and be back up and going with no additional cost. Down the road depending on how long I hold off on the Mac I can throw in some DDR2 ram and that'll take a huge advantage and give me a nice speed boost over my current DDR. I'm also probably going to put in a PCI-X Nvidia 6600gt card in the next couple of weeks as my current AGP card is dog slow.
I'm planning on fully testing this dual core chip so first experiment is to install Vmware ESX server and see how well it handles near hardware level virtualization. The goal being using Ubuntu for my primary desktop needs and also having an XP os installed and stripped down for gaming. Oh also the chip is 64bit so it'll be XP64pro and Ubuntu64 to see how they work. If Vmware is still to big of a pig then I'll go to dual boot mode.
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So rebooted into my old system, figureing a mobo and cpu swap would give XP a heart attack, but it wasn't the case at all. Booted into XP waited a few minutes for it to do all the driver updates, rebooted and everything was working. Totally shocked I was. Hell I've changed CPU's and RAM and had more problems then this.
Anyway inital tests are all good, haven't started OC'ing anything yet but it's all done through the bios so once I let it burn in for a while it's time to start OC'ing it a few points.
Tonight I work on changing the OS's around. Goal being Ubuntu64 for my main and then striping the hell out of XP64 so it's as lean as possible for my game fix. I tested Vmware ESX server at work and it's good for virtualizing servers but it's just not going to cut the mustard for what I want it to do. I may piss around with Xen but I think it'll be in the same boat.