jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Thu Jan 1 10:59:00 CST 2009
I have been replacing the motherboards in the systems at my office, moving to Phenom II compatible. Because I don't game and thus don't need massive graphics power, I have started using a board with integrated graphics: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138128 I started using it because the built-in graphics could generate the 720P TV signals and had the built-in HDMI as well as DSUB, so I started with it as a Windows Media Center MB, but is is a nice little mid range board. BTW I have been buying these as "open box" from Newegg which means I am getting them for about $70 shipped to my house. Not a bad price for this board, and so far I have had no problems with everything being in the box. Yesterday I replaced an aging motherboard in one of my servers. The system had a hardware RAID card with Windows 64 and SQL Server 64, booting off the RAID. In the past I used to do a clean install simply because just swapping boards was problematic to say the least, but this time I had everything set up and functioning so I decided to at least try to just swap the MB and see what happens. The old board used an NVidia NForce4 chipset (no graphics processor) whereas the new motherboard uses an AMD 790GX chipset with graphics processor built in. I powered down, moved the processor to the new MB, installed the motherboard and powered up. It booted right into Windows. All I had to do was to go into My Computer / Hardware / device manager, delete all the yellow hardware items, force a rescan and have it load the correct drivers for the new hardware found. Voila, motherboard replaced. In January or February when the new Phenom II chips become available I will replace the old Phenom I in the servers to get a reasonable performance bump, and move the old Phenoms into a couple of other machines currently running x2 3800 CPUs. It's always nice when things just work the way you hope. -- John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com