After the machine refused to boot late last night, I figured it was finally time to put my old computer out of its misery. The ASUS motherboard, which had served me well for almost three years, finally died, and ceased to POST. While I did get the board to run not even an hour later, it was clear that any hope for stability was out the window.

I came home this morning with the Gigabyte EP45-UD3P, an excellent board powered by the Intel P45 + ICH10R chipset. Not only would it handle my Core2Quad processor, but it also had the necessary RAM slots and heat dissipation to match my previous board, but at a fraction of the cost. Seeing as many of the problems with the old board became painfully clear when I attempted to overclock, I was pleased to see the wealth of options the board has when it comes to pushing the system to its limit.

The Arctic 7 CPU Heatsink, which now dominates the upper half of my case.

After a couple hours of cleaning and installation, it was clear that the old ASUS board had some serious problems, many of which I failed to pick up on. The very first thing I noticed was the drastic difference in hard drive speeds – I could actually achieve drive-to-drive copy speeds of over 60mb/s. That’s almost double what the old ASUS board would give me, and explains why I had so many storage related errors during the old board’s last week. More so, overclocking actually works this time, and I didn’t encounter a single issue or BSOD running with a full 4gb of RAM. Honestly, there’s no better feeling than knowing I wasn’t truly crazy all these years when suspecting something was wrong.

One thing I found amusing was the presence of an Infineon TPM chip on the board. While these were introduced a couple years ago, they were intended mainly as a tool for DRM – and in Apple’s case, to lock their operating system and their hardware to one another. Yet, they’ve slowly been making their way into consumer motherboards, as a new form of encryption and file security. It’s an interesting move, and an option I’m sure many paranoid users will appreciate, though one I’m not particularly interested in.

I always love putting together a new PC, or, in this case, breathing life into an old one. Being the shutterbug I am, I took the opportunity to snag a couple pictures of the build process, which you can find on Flickr if you’re interested.