Abit AS8-V

Grr... My EpoX 8RDA+ mobo has died. For some reason. I only know that while rebooting the dreaded blue screen of death appeared warning of significant hardware failure and the next thing I couldn't reboot. A five minute diagnostic reveals that the CMOS has been damaged. Because of its age (1 1/2 year) warranty is out of the question. And this is my second EpoX 8RDA+ that got killed in two years. Bastards.

Fortunately my two 512Mb DDR400 sticks are alright.



A trip to Tottenham Court Road and I found the cheapest Mobo/CPU combo I could find. A Abit AS8-V motherboard which is fine. Yes I am returning to Intel. Temporarily. My 'proper' upgrade is later and that is when I will invest in a 64-bit AMD. But this is just an emergency solution meant to last just a year.



Am surprised by how small socket 775 is. I am so used to using Socket A for the past four years. Cute, for some reason.



Yes folks. Laugh if you want - that is a fucking Intel Celeron D processor. 256k of L2-cache only. 533Mhz FSB. 2.8Ghz clock speed. Pathetic. But this will do for the time being. I stopped playing PC games and the only CPU intensive stuff I do is ripping DVDs and converting them into portable size for PDA playback.



The underneath of the processor:



Here it is sitting innocently:




I remember the hellish time I had trying to install the large and noisy Aerocool heatsink/fan on my Athlon. Intel's solution is pretty easy. Just press down on each edges and it clicks in. Easy.



Speed is alright. Nothing to brag about. Slightly faster than my AMD (which was overclocked to 2700+) but at times slower. Amazingly most of my drivers were wiped out even though the only thing I changed were the motherboard and processor.

Some of you may be questioning why the cheap upgrade. It is hardly future proof. There is are no PCI-Express slots. No DDR2 support. The only differences with my old 8RDA+ are two additional SATA slots and processor socket. I even lost Firewire support! (But who uses Firewire anyway?) First was memory. DDR2 isn't much faster (from what I read) and is really expensive. I got my two 512Mb sticks two years ago for 30quid each.

I stated that I don't do PC gaming any longer. Hence my GeForce Ti4800SE on AGP is more than enough even with its small 64Mb onboard memory.

My experience with EpoX meant that I should get a quality mobo. I know EpoX 8RDA+ was the overclockers choice back in the heydays of Throughbread. Not sure about it now.

I have decided to delay a full upgrade for two years now that I have wasted some money on this. Then Longhorn would out and an upgrade would probably be warranted. But for now this will suit me just about fine.