Ame’s computer is done and I have my own machine back to myself again!

From Saturday Morning, Schmatterday Morning, I discovered the northbridge (is that even the right name for it?) heatsink/fan combo had fallen off the board and had been dangling for who knows how long and the chip now has a nice little scorch mark. Zap. Fried. This was a part I had replaced myself before because the original assembly had developed this annoying grinding noise and a thorn in my paw for that board for a long time.  Come to think of it, the part probably came off from our recent move – unfortunately, there was no performance degradation until the thing simply wouldn’t power up anymore.

The board was dead. A replacement is the most logical step, right? Too bad it was an Intel Socket 478 board and the only one that was readily available anywhere didn’t support AGP for the old nVidia 6800 currently in the machine. Ugh. So that means you have to replace the board, the card, and of course the CPU. At this point, we could just salvage what we could like, well… it turns out nothing, but I’ll get to that.

Ame was keen to learn how to build a computer from parts, so I supervised. There was some excitement with the motherboard installation and the silver thermal paste, but it was mostly a smooth install with no malfunctions. I’ve never gone AMD before, but it was pretty painless and things work great so far.

Some gripes:

1. The motherboard is short for an ATX board. I’m used to installing out to the edge of the range of the mounting screws, using about 8. This one is shorter and doesn’t extend that far. The problem comes in when you want to plug the 24-pin power supply connector. You have to make sure that connection is solid, but doing so has the potential to bend the board! Do not want!
2. Another problem with the motherboard; there’s only one IDE connector. That sure was a surprise when we tried to hook up her existing hard drives and the optical drive. Ame ended up ordering a SATA drive as a workaround.
3. The Windows Vista install disc is a DVD! The optical drive she had before was a CDRW drive. We used a salvaged DVDROM drive from another unused computer to pull this duty.
4. Steam needs SP2 to work and Vista’s auto-updater didn’t detect SP2 as an installable update so I had to get it manually.

Other things were a breeze though, like the front-panel audio connection. I love my Antec case, but the front-panel-audio squid is horribly labelled and I have no earthly clue how to plug it in. Ame’s case has a dumb-proof connector that looks like an internal USB plug and it just hooks in. Sigh. Jealously really. Otherwise my own case is supar teh-awesome.