Mobo madness
It's been a big month in the Labs, but it's all paid off in the end.
Motherboards. The Labs this month is absolutely filled to the brim with them. Not only do we have our massive motherboard Labs, but with all the testing needed for our upgrade feature, the Labs team have been knee deep in components all month. As such, we've hereby dubbed this month 'Australian International Month of the Mobo' in the Labs. Ahh, it all took me back to my Labs days of fiddling with SIMMs, DIMMs and RIMMs, probing BIOSes and hacking the registry to get stubborn drivers and benchmarks to work…
The upgrade feature was actually very interesting to watch unfold. As we took old systems and progressively upgraded them, even we were surprised at some of the results. It really goes to show that for a very reasonable outlay, you can add a good couple of years of life to your PC.
Another lesson that came from the upgrade feature, and a lesson I relearned for myself several weeks ago when I performed an upgrade at home, is the kinds of trouble you can get into when performing upgrades. These days the hardware is of such good quality that it is very rare to find a hardware incompatibility or to have a component fail, but the software side of things can still cause shenanigans. More often than not we found ourselves better off formatting and completely reinstalling Windows and updating all the drivers whenever adding a new component - especially if it's the motherboard. Sometimes Windows can handle a mobo swap, but even now it's still a hit and miss affair. So before you do your mobo wrangling, be sure to back everything up, and be prepared to load a fresh copy of Windows from scratch (and activate it, if necessary).
Also, one reason we decided to run the motherboard Labs along side the upgrading feature is when it comes to deciding which mobo to use, there are so damn many chipsets at the moment, it becomes a bit of an exercise in research and jargon decryption. So we thought it would be great to have all the chipsets broken down in a single feature for reference. It took us 15 pages to get through them all, but the Labs gives a great snapshot of all the options around today.
Overall, this month, Darren, David, Dan and Nirmal have all put in a monumental effort bringing all these components and motherboards together – and worn a deep path in the AJB shag between the Labs and the editorial department in the process. And I don't know about you, but I love the work done by Stu and Phil with the model kit illustrations too.
Finally, the PC Authority Website has been undergoing a process of evolution over the last few months, and new features are being added all the time. If you haven't dropped by for a while, check out www.pcauthority.com.au and see what's new.
Tim Dean, Editor – tdean@pcauthority.com.au