Reviving an Old AMD Rig

There’s an old 3A-platform rig at home: AMD 965, R5770 GPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a crappy AMD motherboard. It still runs okay if you push it, but it’s a power hog.

So I hauled it into the office. Conveniently, the crappy Lenovo desktop they’d issued me had died anyway.

After reporting it, I found the old rig’s motherboard was on its way out, so I grabbed a cheap ASRock AM3+ board off Taobao. Listed as clearance stock — turned out to be brand damn new when it arrived. Literally new.

Then, to deal with cooling, I bought a garbage Xuanbing 300 off JD. Good enough, I guess.

Back on the motherboard

After putting it all together, sure enough, all those instabilities before were the crappy motherboard’s fault. New board is the real deal. Tried overclocking too — 4 GHz booted fine at first, but it kept failing to start, and I was scared to bump the voltage and have it die during long uptimes, so I dropped it to 3.7 GHz.

Ran World of Warcraft for a while since it’s a CPU hog, and it was stable, so I left it there. The junker’s been running for two weeks now without a shutdown. Solid, honestly.

Let’s see how long this power-guzzler lasts before it croaks…