Phenom-enal

Well I wasnt going anywhere today - not after doing the Yorkshire Three Peaks again yesterday! A bit sore to say the least! So, knowing i'd be staying in anyway awaiting deliveries, I thought i'd get the AMD Phenom CPU installed.

Before I even got the anti-static service kit out, a knock at the door put Sams new GPU in my hands. So that was something else to do while I had all the service kit out.

The AMD Phenom X4 Black Edition CPU went in easily enough, although lifting out the old Athlon chip was a bit tricky, resulting in plenty of heatsink compound getting smeared about. I probably put on a little bit too much new compound, but the cooler clamped back down ok.

So with a slightly worried feeling I re-powered the machine - the BIOS saw the new CPU immediately and invited me to enter set-up and check all was well. Windows on the other hand decided that it would be a bit awkward and just be really slow in updating the drivers and restarting, even accusing me of having a non-genuine copy for a while! But eventually it settled down and all seems to be running fine, if a little hot. Idle, the cores can site around 40c, running 100% BOINC WUs it hits 75%, and is on the very edge of thermal throttling (seen it just once while also opening some PDFs). A new Coolermaster Hyper 212LED CPU cooler is on order, so hopefully once thats fitted the temperatures will be a bit more sensible.

I also installed Sams new GPU for him, and did some cable management within his machine. At the same time I put in his spare 1TB SATA harddrive. This led to a bit of confusion as the machine seemed not to detect it! But it could be found in BIOS, and also we discovered in Windows hardware manager, just not in MyComputer? It turned out of course that as it was unformatted it couldnt be shown as it had no assigned drive letter! Soon sorted once we'd located the windows admin tools page!

I decided late that theres no real likelyhood of my ever needing to use my old phone again, so have dismantled the connector strip from the battery. Even in this state, the 2k4 resistance still exists, so this surely must be involved in the battery management in some way. Tomorrow if I get around to it, I will hard wire that resistance into the supply pins, and i'll let it settle for a few hours to see if any effect is evident.