Up and running

Interesting weekend, if only for the fact that I finally managed to get my Opteron up. Minus a case, which means I had to set it up on my table next to the AthlonXP's box, all bare and forlorn, cables sticking out and drives lying in a circle.

I was missing two parts of the puzzle, some of you who have read my earlier rants would remember. A graphics card and a power supply. Initially I was prepared to even put in a lowly PCI card just to get my system running, but strangely enough, even that wasn't available in most of the places I went to. I looked at the next cheapest option, the 6200TC - but that was way too expensive; especially considering that I would have thrown it away when I got a "proper" card anyway. So I bit the bullet and am now the proud owner of an MSI 7900GT! Certainly amongst the top 3-4 GPUs available today - 7900GTX, X1900, X1800, 7900GT... Of course, it was expensive, much more than what I ought to have paid, I think; but what the heck.

My run-ins with the computer shops continued, this time around in Nehru Place. Why do people have the idea that video RAM is the only parameter a buyer would be interested in? Or is there a large scale scam going on in which the humbler GPUs are sold off as being superior to their elder brothers because they happen to have more video RAM? But I saw this feeling towards RAM size outside the shops too, among my less-fortunate friends (i.e. clueless newbies). A lot of people refused to understand why I was spending the equivalent of an entire low-end PC just on a card to display video.

The other item I wanted was a power supply. Now, considering that I am running a dual core Opteron and a 7900GT, I certainly didn't want to go for a no-name box. I went from shop to shop, in increasing frustration, only to discover that nobody had even heard of Antec. I expected better from Nehru Place - Mercury was the most respectable brand they could come up with. In sheer desperation, I called up a friend to ask about the CoolerMaster distributor in Delhi. But as luck would have it, I finally saw a shop with a CoolerMaster PSU in the display! To cut it short, I went in and bought a 450W CoolerMaster and found possibly the one shop in Nehru Place that had a person who knew that the Opteron165 was a dual core, and who recognized the MSI 7900GT from the box I was carrying.

Back home, I cannibalized my AthlonXP for a hard disk and a DVD ROM drive, not to mention the monitor, keyboard, mouse and UPS. Got it up and running and saw that when it runs it really RUNS! My motherboard is meant for overclocking and has sufficient options so that I was soon running my Opteron at 2.1GHz while the RAM ran cooly at 390MHz. Considering my cheapo RAM had been the bottleneck in all my previous OCing experiments, this motherboard is manna from heaven.

The Nvidia drivers decided that my 7900GT could actually run at 531MHz and not the stock 450, but I thought I wouldn't push my luck too far. I still have to get a decent case, with lots of fans. Threw a couple of games at this thing, everything runs with everything maxed out, as they say, with extremely decent gameplay. What more could I ask for?