E4026 Upgrade

04.22.07

On opening the case I was somewhat annoyed yet unsurprised by the fact that there was a sub-standard mobo in it. A Intel D915GAG is a descent mobo- if it has all it's slots on it.

I bought an ASUS P5VD2-MX motherboard, Palit GeForce 7600GT and 2GB of Corsair VS 533 RAM (533 is the fastest my mobo choice supported). At January 2007 from Scan, this was £260.
QUOTE (The Asus P5VD2-MX)

Form - Micro ATX/úATX (although it's actually slightly smaller)
Slot - LGA775/Socket T
CPU - Click Here, supports Dual Core 65nm cpus.
FSB - 533/800/1066
Chpst - NorthVIA P4M890, South VIA VT8237A
RAM - Two DDR2 slots, Supports 400/533 DDR2 up to 4GB
Sound - SoundMAX HD Audio
PCI -One PCI-Expressx16 slot, One PCI-Expressx1 slot, Two PCI slots
Storage - Two IDE Connectors, Two SATA (1.5Gbps), One SATA (3Gbps), One external SATA (3Gbps), One Floppy Connector
Power - One Main 24Pin Motherboard Connector, One 4Pin CPU Connector
Package - Manual, Driver CD, IDE Cable, SATA Cable, 4pin Molex-to-SATA Power cable, Back I/O Plate, "powered by ASUS" Sticker.

The Process

Physical
Switching over was easy, except for one thing I hadn't noticed until I tried installing the CPU. The Heatsink and fan that came with my E4026 requires a backplate behind the motherboard so that it can screw into it and be held in place.

But getting the backplate off the Intel board was the hard part. You can't just take it off, it has some kind of sticky solid-gel-like material that makes it stick to the back of the motherboard. Unfortunately I had to use a screwdriver to poke at the holes on the front of the motherboard to encourage the backplate to come loose, and then rather forcefully use a screw driver to wedge it off. When it did come off I put it onto the new mobo, but since the sticky-solid-gel-material hadn't settled in enough I had to install the cpu and heatsink before installing the mobo into the case.

Virtual
Now since I was replacing the motherboard I knew that XP wouldn't like that. But with all installations of motherboards it's worth a try to see if XP can just accept it. Well, no it didn't.

Now here's the part we all know and love, the recovery cd. Oh the joyous pleasure of being an owner of such cd- who wants an XP CD when you've got a recovery disc anyway?

From past experience, I know that the non-destructive install was a worthless feature that didn't help me at all. I had tried to find someone with an XP Home disc, but everyone I knew had XP Pro. So I did a destructive install, the recovery disc wiped my hard drive and installed XP again with sp2. Luckily I had backed up my stuff beforehand onto 2 CDs.

It worked! I had no trouble activating windows, and the eMachines disc didn't refuse to install because of changes. Maybe I'm just one lucky guy

Result

Limitations

The eMachines case and the chassis fan that came with it have a few problems with this board. The chassis fan is a 4pin fan whilst the motherboard connector is 3 pin. This results in the fan spinning at full speed (around 3100rpm for me), which can be quite loud in the morning, but you soon get used to it. I still haven't got round to buying a 3 pin one.

The front panel of the E4026 (a UK Nexgen case), has 3 connectors. One 2pin connector for the HDD LED, one 2pin for the power button, and a 2pin for the power button's light (to signify that the pc is on, it also flashes when on standby). This motherboard suits all except the power button light, the motherboard powers the power button light with 3 pins as oppose to the Nexgen's 2. Thus when the pc is on standby you don't really know if it's off or on standby.

Pin Limitations - The Green lines point to the three pins of the power button LED, the picture on the right shows my 4 pin fan connected to the 3 pin fan connector.

Here is what the computer looks like on the inside, the green lines show how the P5VD2-MX is slightly smaller than the max úATX size (this should be good for some emachines cases). The blue line shows how a GeForce 8800GTX will indeed fit in the case, and the orange circle shows how convenient a SLI connector is for holding my fan cables together XD.

Performance

I haven't fully finished upgrading, I need a better CPU since it's probably bottlenecking my graphics with it's 533FSB. With full settings on 1024x768 I get 83FPS on CSS's video stress test.

Xylaquin