The components arrived on Monday. I spent about two hours on Monday evening installing them, making sure everything was just right where I wanted. Most of my time and effort went into tidying up the cables and such with nylon ties in order to promote good airflow inside the case.
One final check before closing the case, I then hooked up all of the USB 2.0 cables (I never realized how much I depend on USB devices these days). The moment of truth arrives and I switch on the power, to which I was greeted to pure AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4600+ performance running at 2.4 GHz with 4 gigabytes of RAM at my disposal.
"Why that's only 2.4 GHz. How can that be fast?" I get asked.
To that very question I laugh. Don't be sold by Intel's marketing ploy at selling processor clock speeds. There's a good reason as to why this AMD 64 X2 Dual Core processor has the "4600+" rating. I'll leave it up to the imaginations of those who question this processor's performance.
Oh yeah, the video card which required me to upgrade my existing power supply to this? I can only say this:
"Holy crap!"
Call Of Duty 2 with all the graphical options set to their maximum levels equals silky smooth performance with no dropped frames whatsoever.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion with all of the graphical options set to their maximum levels equals silky smooth performance with no dropped frames whatsoever either.
And those are only two of the games I got to test since Monday.
Adobe Photoshop CS2 starts up and performs much, much, much faster.
Corel PaintShop Pro XI starts up much faster, and performs even better.
Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise Edition is also extremely responsive.
All in all, this has been a very satisfying upgrade experience.