Time Has Spoken!
Well folks, back on the 19th, I wrote of how I might be acquiring a new used tower with the Dell XPS branding on it. Due to some unfortunate circumstances within the previous owner's household, I've been told that our trade works out well for them and the XPS is now mine to upgrade at will.
So, the first "upgrade" I'm giving it would be that optical drive. Honestly, that's about the only thing it needs to get back into operation the quickest. Though I have, only recently, finished reading reviews on this optical drive that I have already ordered. It seems that it has a 50% DOA rating. The thing is, did these people know how to install the drive upon arrival? Did they do what was necessary to install the device correctly or did they just assume that everything would fit together like kismet? Well, we shall see. There have been a lot of "love it or leave it" type reviews on Newegg.com. Apparently OEM hardware doesn't come with the cable necessary to connect it to the other hardware. In this case it's not much of a problem since the old optical drive in this machine is pretty badly messed up. So I'll just be using the existing cables that attach to the BD-Rom. No biggie.
The next things I plan on adding to this system in the far off future include:
8 GB RAM (2GB x4)
500+ GB HD (Western Digital or Seagate)
450+ Watt Power Unit
512MB to 1GB Video Card (PCIe 2.0+ (brand not decided yet due to Nvidia falling away in the hardware aspect.))
Yes, in other news, recent reviews of Nvidia graphics chipsets has shown a decreasing number of stream processors, lowered data bandwidth and much jumpier performance than in the old days. Seems that ATI is benefiting from AMD's acquisition in a good way. While Nvidia tries to beef up it's high end cards beyond what we need today, ATI fills the void. Does this mean I like them any better? Well, no, not exactly... but I will be keeping my eye on them for a little bit.
Users of my TeamSpeak 3 server be aware:
The server will come down for maintenance sometime this weekend or early next week as improved hardware comes in off the UPS truck. So, if you try to connect and are greeted with an "Error", now you know why. If you connect to my server before then, you'll get a message that contains all of this info in the Offline Message area. Related articles by Zemanta
So, the first "upgrade" I'm giving it would be that optical drive. Honestly, that's about the only thing it needs to get back into operation the quickest. Though I have, only recently, finished reading reviews on this optical drive that I have already ordered. It seems that it has a 50% DOA rating. The thing is, did these people know how to install the drive upon arrival? Did they do what was necessary to install the device correctly or did they just assume that everything would fit together like kismet? Well, we shall see. There have been a lot of "love it or leave it" type reviews on Newegg.com. Apparently OEM hardware doesn't come with the cable necessary to connect it to the other hardware. In this case it's not much of a problem since the old optical drive in this machine is pretty badly messed up. So I'll just be using the existing cables that attach to the BD-Rom. No biggie.
The next things I plan on adding to this system in the far off future include:
8 GB RAM (2GB x4)
500+ GB HD (Western Digital or Seagate)
450+ Watt Power Unit
512MB to 1GB Video Card (PCIe 2.0+ (brand not decided yet due to Nvidia falling away in the hardware aspect.))
Yes, in other news, recent reviews of Nvidia graphics chipsets has shown a decreasing number of stream processors, lowered data bandwidth and much jumpier performance than in the old days. Seems that ATI is benefiting from AMD's acquisition in a good way. While Nvidia tries to beef up it's high end cards beyond what we need today, ATI fills the void. Does this mean I like them any better? Well, no, not exactly... but I will be keeping my eye on them for a little bit.
Users of my TeamSpeak 3 server be aware:
The server will come down for maintenance sometime this weekend or early next week as improved hardware comes in off the UPS truck. So, if you try to connect and are greeted with an "Error", now you know why. If you connect to my server before then, you'll get a message that contains all of this info in the Offline Message area. Related articles by Zemanta
- nVidia Hot News - Which Is Not Good (lockergnome.com)