Upgrading my rig

This weekend, I had planned to upgrade my desktop PC.

My PC was already a venerable powerhouse. Equipped with an AMD Sempron 2200+ (1.5GHz) processor, 512MB of RAM, and a GeForce 400MX IGP, it had the muscle to play all 3D FPS games of… well, the year 2003 at best

The reason behind this upgrade was to spend less of my extremely valuable time twiddling my thumbs and waiting for Firefox to start, or a Half-Life 2 episode to load.

So I headed off to Chenoy Trade Centre at Secunderabad, to an affable guy named Gaffar at a store called ‘Computer Bazaar’. Incidentally, this is also where I had bought this PC. Till date, I’m not sure if this guy hoodwinks me with all his tall claims

I had a budget of around 10k INR in mind. This is what I ended up with, after overshooting it by around 1.3k:

• AMD Althon64 X2 4600 (dual core, clock speed of 2.4GHz)
• Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H mobo based on the AMD 780G chipset, featuring ATI Radeon 3200 HD IGP
• 2GB DDR 667 RAM
• Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA hard drive
• A new 400W SMPS from a shady brand (Xtec, if I remember correctly)

This does look neat!

The motherboard itself was highly rated by tech articles on the internet, and it does boast an array of features. I’ve yet to test the performance of the IGP on this board. As per this Techtree.com article, this IGP is capable of allowing playable framerates at medium resolutions/quality details for quite recent games such as F.E.A.R, HL2: Lost Coast and Quake 4! Far Cry should also be playable, woo hoo!

The folks at the store assembled this setup, and I brought the cabinet home. Powered on, and was greeted with this message:

GRUB: Loading stage 1.5…. Read Error

Since I had two hard drives now (an older 80GB IDE/PATA drive, and the new SATA drive), I was half expecting things to go wrong. Hence, I had planned to perform a fresh dual boot setup of Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Windows XP on the new SATA drive. When I popped in the Windows XP bootable disc, and rebooted the system, the CD failed to boot.

I rebooted into the BIOS, and could not find the DVD drive listed anywhere. Trying to plug in the IDE cable and power supply for the DVD drive again did not help. Finally it dawned upon me that the master-slave configuration of the drive was probably incorrect for my new configuration. I switched the jumper at the back of the DVD drive. Voila! Not only was the DVD drive recognized, but GRUB was also able to boot everything properly!

I still plan to perform fresh OS installs on the SATA drive for better performance. For now, I’m continuing with my old XP install, and a fresh Ubuntu 8.04 install over the 7.10 installation (since I’ve had a few problems with ATI drivers on Gutsy, and wanted an excuse to upgrade to Hardy anyway).

I’ll probably post on the performance of the IGP and the new processor/RAM combo later. But from what I’ve seen, the toil has been well worth it

~Raj