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.

Accord­ing to doc­u­ment­a­tion, you should just be able to socket replace your AMD Ath­lon (Socket AM2) with an AMD Phe­nom. Boot, and watch the bits fly. Well, theoretically.

In my Gigabyte’s case: this was not to be so. The smal­ler Giga­byte GA-MA69GM-S2H (blah!) is in our Media Cen­ter PC. This com­bin­a­tion has been work­ing well in pro­duc­tion for months.

Con­tinu­ous beeps (longish) from the Power-on-self-test (POST) indic­ates either power, memory, mother­board or somesuch fail­ure. The Giga­byte doc­u­ment­a­tion is 7 lines long and 7 pages short on helping.

OK, read­ing the pro­ced­ures on for­ums and stuff.

It’s not the power sup­ply. I can swap out the Phe­nom and Ath­lon with the same “everything” and it boots.

The Giga­byte online spe­cific­a­tions state that the 9600 Black Edi­tion (BE) is sup­por­ted with a recent BIOS update. My BIOS has been at this update for the last 2 months in anti­cip­a­tion of the Phe­nom processor.

In short, wait people. Or at least research a little more than I did. Col­leagues report that ASUS mother­boards are work OK.

Oh the joys of hardware.

Yes, I know that the cor­rect eng­lish spelling of Cen­ter is Centre.

Thanks to the gen­er­os­ity of Jeffa, I scored an old Mini-ATX case with power sup­ply. Yeah, being the junior on the team — I get all the hand-me-downs.

Some hun­dreds of dol­lars later from AUS­P­CMar­ket, and I have my first ever:

1. AMD based PC (AMD Athlan64 x2 6000+)
2. Giga­byte Mother­board PC (GA-MA69GM-S2H)
3. Self-constructed PC (only a screw­driver required)
4. Media Cen­ter PC (Vista Ultimate)
5. Microsoft Wire­less Key­board 8000

Not being a hard­ware type, the mov­ing of cables, CPUs, fans, more cables and stuff made the phys­ical con­struc­tion a little longer than an expert. There are still some internal wir­ing bits to com­plete: hard disk light at the front and CD audio. Also missed that the our Acer LCD TV has VGA and PC Audio. The cables I pur­chased were not correct.

The toughest part was installing the power to the SATA DVD/CD drive, and ensur­ing the CD eject but­ton had enough clear­ance to work.

The first PATA (this was a sur­prise!) hard disk was stuffed, so off to plan B with a 500Gb PATA and we’re away. The mother­board would not boot up with this hard disk attached; so the old disk is a throw away.

Using the onboard graph­ics and USB based TV tuner is prob­ably sub-optimal. Need to fix these.

To add/change

1. Dual chan­nel PCI DVB-T card
2. DivX sup­port (com­plete at 9:40pm)
3. TV Guide so I can record TV successfully.

Oh, and the cats love the extra space. The case and CPU are quiet and rel­at­ively cool. The cave aspect of the case make it a per­fect hunt­ing spot: