A peek inside.

In my first post, I mentioned that I had already made a change to my computer's makeup. About last week, when I had this idea, I already had a few spare parts on hand. Nothing phenominal, mind you, but it was a start. I had two one gig sticks of DDR2 RAM, and a video card. An nVidia 7800GTX 512MB, to be exact. See the picture below. Even better, I had two of them. So, here goes the upgrade.

To get started, I took my PC from it's normal position, detached all it's cables, and moved it to a table. After removing the side panel, I was disappointed. The mobo only had one PCIe 2.0 slot! Fine. I'll only go with one card. But then came the next surprise; there weren't any PCIe power connectors on the power supply, and there weren't enough 4 pin molex connectors to make one! So, I was apparently stuck there. I installed the RAM, and in the meantime, had an idea. I had a spare power supply in the other room that did have a connector. I'd just change them out, and I'd be good.

So, I disconnected all my connectors, unscrewed the power supply, and realized another thing about this rig; the CPU fan rests directly below the power supply. After removing the CPU fan, I was able to pull the PSU out easily. I put the new one in, reconnected everything, screwed the fan back on, and -the point of all this- installed the video card. The bios picked everything right up, and so did Windows 7. All I got from it was a nifty little popup box that said I needed to restart for these changes to take effect. OK.

Now it all runs smooth. I'm even running two 15" monitors now, thanks to dual DVI outputs. All these are temporary measures, though, until I can buy better upgrades. My next objective after this is to move everything into a bigger box, so it will all fit (after realizing that the case everything is in now is DEFINATELY not enough). Hopefully I'll post about that in the next month. There will be other posts in between though, so don't be disappointed. I'll also post pics of what it looks like inside my rig soon. By the way, if anyone has tips for my upcomming mod, please share them in a comment. Until next time.

EDIT: Here are the pics inside I promised;

Pretty cramped, eh?