AtomicInternet Archived News

After passing on one too many motherboard deals, this one finally got me to cave. Duane and Stavos had me converted to Intel architecture awhile back, but the quad cores are still too expensive, so I settled on a more affordable Core 2 E7200 for now. The beauty of this motherboard is that it accepts both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, so I was able to recycle the memory and every other component from my old system to create the new one for less than $200. The upgrade finally put me in the 10,000 3DMark club, and the onboard ICH9R RAID controller boosted my I/O by at least 10MB/s across the board. Surprisingly my Vista rating remained the same, suggesting all the gains were due entirely to the faster front side bus. The upgrade also introduced me to the new LGA 775 CPU interface which initially blew my mind. Instead of pins on the processor, there is a "Land Grid Array" of pins on the motherboard that match contacts on the CPU. Initially fearing homeland security would arrest me for using such fascist technology, I quickly remembered I had blown $200 on an unnecessary upgrade putting me back into the more accepted blind consumer category.