I have one minor issue left, and that is that I find it does not come out of sleep well. Well, technically it comes out instantly, but I get a blue screen 20 minutes later or so. It has happened twice now, so I don’t sleep it at this time. Either let it run over night or shut it down. I’ll eventually get to the bottom of it, but for now Pandora’s box remains open a sliver …
 | So, for those who have not read my latest brain fart exploits, basically I destroyed the wonderful AMD 1100T 6 core processor because I tried to replace an awful first generation Zalman CNPS10X Extreme CPU Cooler that was too large for the crappy single clip that was holding it and thus was crashing the machine several times a day. |
It was so difficult to get in there to undo the clip that I ended up twisting the cooler, which inadvertently ruined the CPU by bending a couple of hundred pins. I will never forgive Zalman for not warning me about it … they already had a new rev of it with a proper clamp when I bought the older rev. Thank you for nothing Zalman!
When I understood that I had destroyed the chip, I had only a day until the weekend and so I embarked on the seeking of a replacement. Of course, the motherboard I was using would not support the new Bulldozer (Zambesi cores) from AMD, so I needed to grab another Thuban, and they were getting scarce. Worse, PC Cyber had been wiped out across the city for non-payment of lease etc (huge expansion gone awry) … so my choices of store were very limited. I finally found the lowest of the 6-core Thubans at Everbest Computers and was able to get things going again with the stock cooler.
I even got the new Thuban to overclock a bit. My performance numbers were ok … it is complaining of new hardware because I was already on the new platform, but I realized that I should save the previous experience index for comparison purposes.
The CPU is doing great, the memory is fine, the graphics are adequate since I am not a gamer. My rendering times in Sony Vegas are decent. Life is good …
And then came the constant crashes. For weeks I could run the system for 30 minutes and then it would hang and I would reboot. This was sheer torture. No calls over Skype, no long editing session in Vega or Lightroom. Very frustrating …
And thus, I opened Pandora’s box by getting a new motherboard. And this one is an AM3+ socket, which means that the new 8 core processors from AMD would fit. And yes, I am aware that they share cache and so are not always faster than the Thuban cores. But for what I do, which is photoshop, Lightroom and Vegas, they are wicked fast. Extra cores wins, even when sharing memory.
However, I installed the old ship in there to keep costs down and lo, and behold, nothing changed. Grrr …
To shorten the story, I have since purchased new RAM (different reason, but still ended up in this machine), the 8 core 8150 by AMD, a Gigabyte 570 GT and an HX850 Corsair power supply. All for various issues that cropped up along the way … well, the cpu and video were more about want than need :-)
Anyway … the power supply was the biggest improvement of them. It made the machine run gloriously quiet and it enabled real overclocking. I am running today at 4400mhz stable for most of the week.
And my speeds are commensurately better …
Not much room to improve from a general user’s perspective.
Was it worth the hassle and the money? Not really. But I will enjoy it anyway. The costs ended up being a fair bit (although less than you would pay for the smallest Apple laptop and there is no contest in their applicability to the tasks I perform daily.) And I will now have a second machine to use as a backup or give away. Have not decided yet.
But be careful when you open Pandora’s box like I did. Each improvement will either beg the next one, or will demand it through failure in some other component. As they say, planning is everything. In this case, I might have gone Ivy Bridge had I thought things through up front. Oh well … 8 cores is just as fast as the fastest Ivy Bridge on highly parallel tasks, so I’m satisfied.
