Category: technology

Phenom in ASUS Motherboard: Works

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After the desperate fail of the Gigabyte motherboard with the Phenom processor last week: I indulged my motherboard addiction, took Michael Kleef’s valuable advice and purchased an ASUS.

Specifically, the ASUS M2A-VM HDMI board. Installed, upgraded the BIOS and it worked. Booted first time. In fact, a few driver installs later and the machine is working.

Performance change: As this machine is primarily a video capture and encoder machine, transcoding is an excellent measurement of performance change.I have a standard 5Gb video that I transcode using Microsoft Expression Encoder with a common output setting.

ASUS M2A-VM AMD Athlon 6000+ : 17m27s

ASUS M2A-VM AMD Phenom 9600 BE : 14m09s

This is a 18.9% improvement in performance.

The Windows Processor performance on the Processor changed from 5.4 to 5.9 (as you would expect)

Now to reconfigure the drivers for the digital video capture.

AMD Phenom Phantom on Gigabyte Guts with no Glory

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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.

My Dream Machine in Three Acts

Can u make me a peecee nows?

After spending late 2007 writing about and building my own fast PC – I realised there was a larger place for the story to be told. But not here. It was time to go PC enthusiast over on Channel 10.

The most difficult piece to write was the overture. Knowing at which technical level to target the writing. Feedback is welcome.

x64 is a barrier that the PC industry is going to push through during 2008. Laptops with only 4Gb of RAM are a bit cheezy and limited.

The overture:

And the three acts:

  1. My Dream Machine: Planning
  2. My Dream Machine: Construction
  3. My Dream Machine: Tuning

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Next articles will be related to how I work on this machine. The old Toshiba craptop just isn’t cutting it anymore.

Good to be rid of writer’s block.