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New ATX Spec Thwarts My Upgrade Plan |
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Written by Michael Salsbury
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Wednesday, 28 December 2005 |
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For Christmas this year, I received a $300 gift certificate to one of my favorite online stores, Newegg. I used the certificate to purchase some upgrades I've long wanted to do to my main PC. That PC used to contain an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ CPU, 1GB of DDR400 RAM, an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard, a GeForce FX 5700LE video card with 256MB RAM, and various other components, including a very nice Antec power supply (550W). Using the gift certificates, I picked up a refurbished Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard, an Athlon 64 3200+ CPU, and an MSI GeForce 6600LE NX6600LE 256MB PCI-e video card that was SLI-capable (thinking ahead to running two of them). I had to drop another $100 of my own in to get all that, but it was well worth doing so, I thought.
Last night, I installed all these components into my main PC's case. I got everything all loaded into and connected to the motherboard. Then I went to plug in the power connector. Imagine my surprise when I learned that "ATX" motherboards now come in two different varieties, 1.x and 2.x. This new motherboard was an ATX 2.0 variety, requiring a 24-pin ATX connector. My power supply is an older 20-pin type that doesn't have a "+4" connector to make it 24-pin like the ATX 2.0 standard requires. So I did all that work and still can't fire the thing up. I went on to Micro Center's site to see if I could find a decent ATX 2.0 power supply. The one I liked was $119.99 before tax. Newegg had the same one for $89.99 (on sale) before a $10 rebate. Even when I added overnight shipping and rush handling to the Newegg order, it was cheaper than Micro Center's price by several dollars. True, I have to wait an extra day, but $20-30 is enough to wait a day for. Reinstalling WinXP on the system should be interesting. I've lost track of how many times I've activated this copy of WinXP on the box... Microsoft's phone staff seem to get slightly more accusatory each time I have to call in, like I'm trying to get them to activate a pirated copy of Windows. Please... (But then, most copy-protection techniques have a nasty tendency to punish the paying customers more than the pirates, who find ways to disable and ignore them.)
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Last Updated ( Monday, 02 January 2006 )
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