I Didn't Want a New PC

I've finally gotten my new PC set up and working reasonably well. I didn't really want to get a new PC, just to speed up my old one a bit. Unfortunately, with my last PC being over five years old at this point, I found myself in an upgrade cascade: the new CPU (Intel Quad Core, 2.4 MHz, $280) required a new motherboard (ASUS P5K-E Wifi, $140) which required a new type of memory (DDR2-800, 2GB, $50) and a new video card (ATI x300, $30) with a PCI-E rather than an AGP bus. I could have reused my old case and power supply, but the power supply had the older 20-pin power connector rather than the current 24-pin style. Since I had previously picked up a new case with a more efficient power supply (Antec NSK4480 with a 380W, 80% efficiency Seasonic PS, $60) pretty cheaply, I decided retire the old case and power supply as well.

I figured I was good to go at this point, so I moved the disks from my old PC to this one and tried to boot up. No go, unfortunately -- the drivers for the disk controller on the new motherboard weren't included in the old system's boot image. Normally, I'd have just booted into rescue mode and fixed the problem, but since I didn't have a SATA CD drive on hand that plan was a non-starter. But that's okay; since I was upgrading from a 32 bit CPU to a 64-bit one, it made sense to do a reinstall anyway. A few days later I had a couple of new drives (SATA DVD drive, $30; 250GB SATA HDD, $65), burned a DVD copy of Fedora 8, did a clean install followed by my usual drill of downloading a bunch of additional packages and copying over a bunch of data from my old system.

Finally, a few weeks and a few hundred dollars later, I had my new PC, and man was it fast! Moore's law may be getting old but it's still in effect. Even running X applications remotely, which I had assumed were network-limited now ran much faster. I can't recall seeing the load ever go over the 25% mark though, so it seems that dual CPUs would have likely done just as well as the quad core CPU that I got. Oh well -- that's one of the questions I was interested in when I decided on the quad core CPU: just how many cores could I utilize effectively?

There were still a few rough edges to be smoothed out, though. The ethernet interface would disconnect and reconnect about once a minute under load, the keyboard would also double or drop keystrokes, and the sound card wasn't reproducing the line in channel from the TV card. Luckily, an upgrade to the latest BIOS (09-01) fixed the keyboard and ethernet problems. There's something still not quite right with the sound, but this seems to be a problem with Pulseaudio, the new audio infrastructure that ships with Fedora 8. There are quite a few complaints about it, but just tweaking all the audio control sliders seems to resolve things for me.

While I'd have preferred a more incremental upgrade path, I've got no complaints about the result -- a much quieter, faster, and more current PC which I'm hoping will keep me happy for another five years.

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