What a list. I am doing a little upgrade to my current system: AMD 2.4ghz socket 754. The OEM CPU fan is a little noisy and raises my room temperature by 7-8 degrees F. I was a little annoyed by its loud fan noise. It was like a wind tunnel but except in my room! I wanted a new silent fan so went with the Thermaltake CL-P0220 100mm. I didn’t need a GPU fan but I wanted one anyways because it looked so snazzy so I went with the ZALMAN VF900.

The install went quite well. It took me about 4 hours to install and configure everything. The GPU did not clear a transistor so I had to use a dremel to remedy that quickly! The SATA drive was a breeze to install but a little loud. Louder than my IDE drives. Its okay though because I purchased it for speed and performance.

To install the SATA drive, I had to remove my primary IDE drive and set my second IDE drive that I had as [slave] to [master]. Once I had that hooked up, I had to boot from a Nortons Ghost cd and restore my backup to the new drive. The backup file was 10gigs. With IDE, to restore was 11minutes. With SATA, the restore was only 5.5minutes. I could only imagine if I was restoring from SATA to SATA. It would be blazing fast mind you!!!

Anyhow, temperatures dropped from the CPU about 10degrees Celsius. Plus, its much, much quieter- fans running at 1700rpm vs. the stock 5500rpm. I don’t know about the GPU improvements but I know its working! The ATI 1600 video cards don’t come with temperature sensing. Sucks but O well.