DECEMBER 2007 MAXIMUMPC 5
BEEFING UP SOCKET 939
Vista is telling me that my PC’s performance is
bottlenecked at the CPU. I have top-of-the-line
graphics with plenty of RAM and an AMD Socket
939 mobo with an FX-57 processor. I’ve looked
at dual cores for my 939, but each core seems to
be clocked lower than my FX-57, and I’m more
interested in gaming than multitasking. With this in
mind, could you tell me the best processor to put
into Socket 939? I’d like this rig to last me at least
another year or so.
—Blake Ogle
Microsoft Vista’s performance scores look to
the future, so they tend to skew in favor of dual-
and multicore machines. Regardless of these
scores, your 2.8GHz FX-57 is indeed the highest-
clocked 939 chip. The problem? It’s single core.
A dual-core 2.6GHz FX-60 will still school it in
most newer applications that support multi-
threading, and you’ll likely be able to overclock
the processor to 2.8GHz without problems.
The bad news is that FX-60s are pricey and
difficult to find. If you want to go dual core, the
cheap route is the Opteron 185—a Socket 939
2.6GHz Opteron with 1MB of L2 per core. It’s
basically an FX-60 without the FX. The main
difference between the Opteron and the FX-60
is the level of multiplier locking—the former
sticks you at 13x—and the reported lower ther-
mals of the Opteron.
If you really want to future-proof your rig,
you’re best off saving your cash and investing
in a sleek, new quad-core CPU. With more and
more games promising multicore support, sink-
ing your cash into a quad-core processor would
be the best way to maximize the life span of
your rig. Of course, that would entail purchasing
a new AM2-based motherboard, as you won’t be
seeing any quad cores on 939 architecture.
RAIDING THE PEARLY GATES
I am a Roman Catholic priest, and I maintain a network
of about 20 computers at the mission here. I want to
have a RAID 1 array to boot from and a RAID 1 array for
data. I don’t want these four hard drives striped to each
other in any way.
I want the boot drive protected by a mirrored
array so that if one drive fails, the second can take
over. I want the data stored in a mirrored array of
drives for the same reason. One of those two mir-
rored data drives would be removable. Can what I
want be done?
—FronWWhat you ask for might be possible, depend-
ing on the RAID implementation on the card
or motherboard. On an Nvidia nForce 680, for
example, you can build two separate RAID 1
arrays using four drives. The RAID controller
will identify each drive that you add to an array.
Your plan to swap out the drives could
work, but it’s hardly an ideal backup scheme
since a mirrored RAID should never be con-
sidered synonymous with a system backup.
Remember, a mirrored array creates two dupli-
cate hard drives in every sense of the word: If
a virus hits your system, that virus will exist
on both drives in your array. The same holds
true if you accidentally delete a file.
If one drive in a mirrored array fails, you
just have to replace it with another drive and
the array will rebuild itself back up to a two-
drive protected entity. While that’s happening,
the odds of the single healthy drive failing
are rather low. But if you’re truly worried, you
might want to lump all of your drives into a
single RAID 6 array. That way, any two drives
can fail and you’ll still have a working system
and all of your data intact.STRUGGLING WITH SLI
How do you go about updating SLI videocard driv-
ers? I have two GeForce 7950 videocards in SLI
mode. I have refrained from updating the drivers
until I first get some advice. What I think you have
to do is uninstall the drivers from both cards and
then install the drivers one at a time with reboots
and then tell the cards to rebuild the SLI with one
the master and one the slave? Is this correct?
—Rob CarverUpdating an SLI configuration is exactly the
same as updating drivers on a single video-
card. The Doctor suggests you first reboot your
rig into safe mode and uninstall your video-
cards’ current drivers. To do that, pull up the
Windows device manager, expand the Display
Adapters menu, right-click each card, and
select Uninstall. Next, restart your computer.
Your screen will probably look a bit wonky or
Windows may try to find and reinstall your card’s
drivers. Don’t let it. Grab the latest 7950 drivers
from Nvidia.com and
double-click the exe-
cutable to install them.
Allow the program to
restart your computer.
When your OS reemerg-
es, you might have toset your display resolution back to its normal
setting, and you’ll surely have to re-enable SLI
for your videocards in the Nvidia control panel.
But you’ll now be running the latest drivers, and
happiness will ensue.GO, GO MOBO! GO!
I own a Compaq Presario desktop with an AMD
Sempron 3400+ CPU. I want to upgrade to an
Athlon 64 X2 CPU, but I first need to upgrade my
motherboard. Will replacing the mobo nuke the
factory-installed copy of Windows XP?
—Dylan WinnReplacing a motherboard will do nothing
to the contents of your hard drive—where
Windows XP is installed. You could throw
your motherboard off a balcony, buy a new
motherboard of the same variety, put your
computer back together, and everything would
be peachy keen.
That said, when you replace your mother-
board, you’ll want to reinstall XP. In fact, it’s
not really a “you’ll want to” issue so much as
it is a “Windows won’t boot” issue. So before
your machine is in pieces on the floor, don’t
forget to back up your important data!Ask the Doctor
Diagnosing and curing your PC problems
Doctor. From Maximum PC, sweet Doctor. Would you please hang out
with me? He works across the street up on the third fl oor of the Shoreline
building. I saw him in his Lab, practicing his fi xes. I knew you might just
send him a computer question to [email protected]. Doctor. From
Maximum PC... he’s the Doctor extreme!After you uninstall your videocard driv-
ers, your computer will default to a
generic VGA mode, which looks like this:
ugly and huge.