Intel AMD Inside

If you've been reading the blog with any consistency you'll know that I'm having problems with my home PC and not little problems, big blue screen of death problems. Well after a little googling and diagnostic work I've been able to figure out my problem, or at least narrow it down to a memory error. Not to get too geeky on you but last night I ran memtest on a 2 gig chip and got over 42 errors in about a minutes time. Of course the same chip when switched to a different ram slot scanned clean, so I think I'm dealing with a bad board.

My options for fixing this were pretty limited. I'm working with an odd speed of Ram (800mhz) and a really old processor (2 ghz celeron dual core), I could find a "new" motherboard but all my options would probably be over priced crap and not worth the upgrade. So, I've decided to take my talents to south beach. More specifically an AMD APU. I took some of my Christmas money and put it towards some new pieces for my PC.

Now let it be known, I'm spending less than $200 on this upgrade but at the end of the day I should have a computer that, if Newegg reviews are to be trusted, will actually play newer games on low to medium settings. Plus I'll have the option of upgrading to a much better video card if I'm so inclined. Essentially I went hog wild with the motherboard and cheap with the memory and CPU/APU giving me multiple upgrade options down the road.

This is a pretty big deal for me, I haven't had a PC that will play current games since Half Life 2. I'm looking forward to trying out some newer games (X-Com: Enemy Unknown comes to mind) that I probably wouldn't look at on the Xbox due to the nature of the controller. Now if I can get it all put together and working without it catching fire.