My New System 2005

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Every two years I upgrade my core hardware.  
That is I upgrade my CPU and motherboard.

Up till now I had been running a Pentium P4 2.66GHz system.
I had not so much fallen behind the power curve as I wanted better performance.
I wanted to move to higher speed memory and to current standards on the USB.

I switched to Windows XP Professional as my Operating System of choice in October of 2004.

So I visited eBay and purchased a Tyan Trinity i875P (S5101) motherboard.

There were some 'gotchas' and those prompted me to write this page.
Construction is scheduled to be completed in February of 2005.

Note: All sub-windows open in a single window.
Comments on Upgrading 2005
Case
  • I reused my large case. My choice was Lianli
Motherboard
  • I chose a Trinity i875P by Tyan. This board uses the newer and faster DDR memory.
  • My CPU is an Intel P4 2.8GHz Northwood.
Pricewatch
Disk Drives
  • I wanted to be able to quickly change operating systems. My goal was to be able to run win98se, win2000pro, winXPpro, winXPhome as well as Linux. In addition I wanted a "disk farm" of better than 100 Gb.
  • My solution to quickly swapping hard drives is shown at Hot Swap
  • With Ghost 2003 this is far less of a problem.
Ultra 133
  • Adding additional EIDE ports need not be a problem. By using an Promise Technology Ultra 133 this new system supports up to eight IDE/ATAPI type drives.
  • I have my 54x CD burner and boot hard drive connected a to the first motherboard IDE port. The 100 Gb Maxtor and 130 Gb Maxtor are connected to the second motherboard IDE port. My second CD drive is connected to the Ultra 133 controller.
  • This configuration works well with all of the above mentioned operating systems. Additional capacity is provided through the USB ports.
CD Drives
  • I wanted to speed up my ability to make CDs.
  • So I added to Creative Labs CD52233E drive the new Goldstar GCE-8240B.
  • I can now burn a copy of CD in less than 4 minutes. I use Nero Express 5.5.9.9.
LAN
  • Increasing client demand required that I have an operational Local Area Network.
  • See the information on Router
  • Wireless networking is 'the new thing'


Results as of mid January Tyan i845 vs. Tyan i875
Dust
  • My main system has been running 24/7 for the past year.
  • As part of the up grade process I took everything apart including the CPU cooling fan. I was astounded at the dust accumulation.
  • Dust kills by trapping heat in components that must be cooled. The larger the air flow the more dust you are going to find. The fins on the aluminum (CPU) cooling block are a case in point.
Rate of Change
  • This project was begun because I have become interested in USB improvements.
  • My older motherboard has USB 1.0 ports.
  • USB version speeds: USB 1.0 is 1.5 Mb/s, USB 1.1 is 12 Mb/s, and USB 2.0 is 480 Mb/s.
  • I hope the 320 times improvement in USB through put will alone justify the upgrade.
CPU
  • Even though the upgrade was from a 2.66 GHz cpu to a 2.8 GHZ cpu there may be a substantial improvement.
  • This has more to do with the increase in the L2 cache (1 Mb vs. 512 Kb) than with the .14 improvement in raw speed.
  • The new CPU also allows for multi threading. These two seemingly small items may result in a substantial improvement in over all system performance.
Problems
  • If something can happen it will ... and at the worst possable time. My power supply failed 15 minutes after the new motherboard was installed. Power supply failure was not total. The 'have power' LED on the mother board continued to light even though the power supply was toast.
  • I thought it might be the CPU so I put the new 2.8 GHz P4 in the old mother board and continued to operate with that as my main system.
  • As soon as I was able to replace the power supply the new i875p MoBo came up.
  • Once again Murphy's Law prevailed. the new MoBo was sufficently different that none of my Ghost images worked on the new system.
  • The i875p ROMBIOS had a factory glitch and so had to be re-flashed with new code. This corrected several hangups.
  • The i875p ROMBIOS will permit booting from an USB device so that is a nice fit with work I am doing in that area.
  • Windows XP seems to install but on reboot the agp440.sys video driver will not load.
Backup
  • For now the newer system will run as a backup to the old system


Windows XP Reinstalling
Problem
  • If you change your hardware enough Windows XP will blue screen on you.
  • To fix this boot from the Windows XP CD
  • Choose enter to do a setup
  • Press F8 (This will indicate that you only want to change Windows and not anny of your application code.)
  • The press R (This will tell Windows to repair your install. This takes a longer time than the inital install.)
  • Let the install continue until it completes.
After Install
  • After Install completes you may be asked to register again.
  • That was no fun !!