Does anyone remember Trigger from Only Fools and Horses?

I was thinking about that scene where Trigger talks about his broom, the one where he says he has had the same broom  for a real long time but he has had to change the head and handle many times, but still uses the original screw!

That’s how it is for my PC, this case(ATX clone based on an Antec design) has been home to at least 4 motherboards ranging from  Abit, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI models. I’ve had Athlon XP processors including Palomino cores, Thorton and my last 32 bit CPU was the XP3200+ Barton cores. This alone makes me sound like 1 of those AMD fanboys, only I’m not, well not really. I started off with an AMD system, it was cheaper to build this way at the time, it wasn’t long before I wanted to upgrade the PC, so I got a bigger processor as this helped overcome a bottleneck, creating another bottleneck in the process. After a few motherboard, CPU and GPU changes I ended up with the XP3200+, running a BFG GeForce 6600GT(OC) with 128mb (I still remember when that was a lot of dedicated graphics memory!).

My first 64 bit PC was a ready built computer, an HP Media Centre m7775 (Core 2 Duo E6600 - 2.4 GHz, 2GB DDR2, Radeon X1650 SE, 320GB Internal HDD 1 + 320GB Personal Media Drive) which came with a warranty that I ended up invalidating when I decided that the graphics card was just too weedy for my games, and I ended up replacing this with an nVidia BFG 8800GT (overclocked to 675mhz).

When my nephew decided to build a new PC he had a motherboard (Asus M3N78 SE) left over, along with CPU, ram and GPU and looking at the specs of his motherboard in comparison to mine I could see it had more potential than mine, as I was already running the most power CPU the motherboard could handle. He let me have those components which went in to my old case (the Antec clone) along with my 8800GT, this AM2+ motherboard had a Dual Core Athlon XII running at 3.2 ghz and the motherboard had support for 4 and 6 core CPUs. This was running great until Need for Speed: World was released and I found that my computer was not powerful enough to run it.

I think what I should have done here is change my motherboard, instead I bought the most powerful CPU my motherboard can handle, an AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition, which was great until I fried my GPU. At the time I thought that this was because I now had hardware that could was pushing my GPU harder than it could handle, however   HitmanAgent47’s explanation makes a lot more sense, ie. it’s down to a design flaw that leads to overheating if the thermal paste is not renewed. This led me to buy a new GPU when I really wanted a new mobo, I got an Asus ATi Radeon 5770 CuCore for £91 when the best price even on eBay was about £150ish. This was good, but now my 800mhz FSB was getting to be a pain so I bought a new motherboard, Asus (again... w00t) M4A89GTD Pro for £109 on eBay (I sold 12 Wii games to raise the money) and put this together adding a new Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 HSF to replace the stock heatsink.
 
As I don't really have any decent benchmarking software, here are some stats to show what I was getting before with the M3N78 SE, then with M4A89GTD Pro using the 4290 OBG and finally the N4A89GTD Pro with the 5770 (all FPS ratings were with default quality settings running at 1920x1080 on a 23" monitor). This build also has 4gb DDR3 running at 1333 and two Seagate 1tb drives running as a striped array. 

• 4 x 500gb WD Black or Blue edition drives(64mb cache)
  
• A second 5770 to use in a crossfire
• A new ATX Case (I like the Cooler Master HAF 912 for the excellent cable management or 1  with a clear side, black interior and good cable management so I can stick some cathodes inside it)
• A 5.25 panel on the front with temp monitors, card readers and USB ports