www.nickhodge.com

So, the pro­ject was ori­gin­ally quite simple. Upgrade the AMD Ath­lon pro­cessor to a Phe­nom processor.

The Giga­byte mother­board sup­por­ted the AM2 socket sys­tem, there­fore replace­ment of the pro­cessor by simple drop in and out. Oh, but com­puters are never that easy.

After fail­ing to boot with con­stant long beeps: I decided to pur­chase an ASUS mother­board. After upgrad­ing the BIOS (see above), the machine seemed to boot OK. Cer­tainly boot and stay stable enough for tim­ing tests of Ath­lon vs. Phe­nom in a pre­vi­ous post.

Adding the extra 2Gb of RAM just pushed the poor sys­tem over the edge. Ran­dom reboots and gen­eral instabil­ity. My first thought was to blame the Phe­nom. How wrong I was.

Thanks to this com­ment from Tim, I hunted down the doc­u­ment­a­tion of the ASUS mother­board and found that the Cor­sair memory I was using was not cer­ti­fied! 5−5−5−12 vs 4−4−4−12 tim­ing memory is not a small thing. Also, there are voltage dif­fer­ences between the memory sticks.

So CM2X1024-6400 did not work, but the CM2X1024-6400C4 is work­ing per­fectly well — 4Gb installed on a Vista x64 24×7 and under CPU load.

Les­son learnt: read the sup­por­ted memory documentation!

Oh, and the Phe­nom is a good 20% or so bet­ter transcod­ing video. Phew.