Instead of politics, you get nerdery.

I’ve acquired a largely undeserved reputation among some of my friends as a computer hardware expert.  This is due in part to the fact that the research I was doing about four years ago was heavily invested in state-of-the-art graphics cards, and in part to the fact that whenever I buy a new computer or upgrade an existing one I research the hell out of it before I lay down cash.  So when my existing hardware package started to fail (Windows XP pro not booting at all and random Linux applications crashing arbitrarily), I headed off to the internet for some market research.

Ars Technica is a pretty good place for this sort of thing.  I took a read through their latest system guide, and eliding my known-good components from their Budget Box configuration, I figured I could upgrade to a significantly improved system for about $400.

As it turns out, I only spent about $550.  Lesson one: budget more money than you think you’ll need.

Now, I didn’t just check Ars Tech.  I read system guides and component reviews at Tom’s Hardware, Sharky Extreme, and AnandTech.  Even better, I checked in with my lab’s sysadmin.  Not only did he support my brand prejudices (Asus and BFG Tech), he sold me a gently-used Geforce 8800 GTX — otherwise about $150 out of my price range — for the same price as the BFGTech 8800GT I was considering.

Lesson two: chat up your sysadmin.

Being a fine upstanding individual, my sysadmin didn’t want to take my money until he’d assured me that the graphics card actually worked.  So we plugged it into a lab machine, which promptly failed to boot.  (This turned out to be a motherboard issue — fuck you very much, Sun Microsystems — and the board worked just fine on another machine.)  Some concern ensued when he plugged two six-pin power connectors into the GPU.

Matt: Gee*, I don’t recognize those.

Sysadmin: Oh, they’re PCI Express power plugs.  Uh, if you don’t have a PCI-E motherboard, you probably don’t have any of these either.

Matt: Looks like I need a new power supply, then.

Sysadmin: Yeah, looks like you do.

Lesson three: Unless you do this sort of thing on a very regular basis, you’ll need answers to questions you won’t think to ask until you’re halfway through the upgrade.  See also lesson one, above.

So eventually I assemble this fine list of budget-priced hardware:

• Asus M2A-VM motherboard
• nVidia 8800 GTX 768MB GPU
• AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+ dual-core CPU
• Antec EarthWatts 650 PSU
• Kingston DDR2-800 RAM

(Antec, by the way, fucking rules.  I was first introduced to Antec’s products during an undergrad internship, where I used their cases to assemble network servers.  I was pleasantly surprised to find them genuinely enjoyable to work with, in, and on.  Based on that experience, I started buying their products every time I could get away with it, and I’ve never been disappointed.)

I put everything together, hit the power switch…

…and XP panicked.  My Linux kernel, being a somewhat more together OS install, booted cheerfully — but my X server coughed and died.  So much for the notion that I’d replace the dodgy hardware and solve all my problems.

Lesson four: If you replace your hardware with significantly revised kit, operating systems expecting the older stuff will get confused.

No big deal, though.  I install a version of the nVidia X drivers that actually supports my new GPU, and my Linux install is saved.  XP, however, requires a new install — I’ve been meaning to repave that partition anyway, so off I go.

Three hours later, everything works except the sound.  Fair enough; I play some silent Company of Heroes and give the upgrade a rest ’til the next morning.

Halfway through the next day, everything works except the sound.

Lesson five: Realtek onboard HD sound sucks dead donkey dick.

The short version is that the Realtek drivers install far enough to render one’s sound system completely foxtrot uniform, but not far enough to actually work.  Best of all, if you’re installing drivers with the recommended “InstAll”** feature, they fail silently.  This is all contingent, according to about 60% of the “authoritative” forum posts I found on this here series of tubes, upon whether your onboard sound is enabled in the BIOS before, during, or after you install XP service pack 2 (or, according to some sites, 3).

If the Realtek HD sound drivers team is reading this: I hope your peckers*** rot off.

So rather than fuck with anywhere from 3! to 7! (seriously) permutations of BIOS settings and XP install orders, I pulled a Republican solution**** and pick up a Sound Blaster X-Fi.  This turns out to be an excellent idea in the end, as it gives me better sound hardware than I’ve ever had before, and finally gives my SR-60s a worthy signal.  Given the Realtek driver issues (see “sucks dead donkey dick”, above), though, installing the X-Fi initially turns my XP install into a kernel-panic quick-reboot feature***** until I repave yet again and clean off the Realtek sound shit.

I should perhaps mention that the mobo’s onboard Ethernet is boringly stable.  So while I wouldn’t mind in the slightest — and might dance a happy little jig — if Realtek’s HD sound driver team died in a “tragic” lab fire, I’d feel kind of bad if that fire inconvenienced the LAN driver team.

Lesson six: The upgrade will take longer than you expect.  See also lesson one, above.

In the end, though, I’m happy: my research code runs in about a third the time it did before the upgrade, my system is stable once more, and rFactor looks fucking amazing on my new graphics card.

——

* I don’t say things like “Gee”.  I usually say things like “Fuck me sideways” instead.  This Bowdlerization is intended as comedy.

** Bonus Lesson 5.1: Avoid features with cutesy-clever names.

*** Dang, that was kind of sexist.  If the Realtek HD sound drivers team employs any women, I hope their clitori rot off instead.  Whew!

**** Borrow-and-spend; also known as VISA ex machina. Okay, I guess you do get some politics.

***** With bonus msvcrt.dll failures on OS load.  Yes, the Realtek drivers suck so hard they fuck up the C Standard Library if you try to work around them.