December 25, 1996: The mother of all my upgrades.
Actually, 4 major upgrades
to be exact: an EPoX P55-VX Motherboard, a 6x86-P150+
processor, 32MB EDO
RAM, and a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 with 2MB. Instead of 50% speed jumps
as in previous motherboard upgrades, this set of upgrades increased
overall system performance by 150%. However it didn't come without a
couple of problems, most notably in first few months of 1997.
Problem 1: One motherboard socket tab broke and it turned out to be a major
hassle. There's too much to tell. I'll say that over a month later, I got a
clip-on CPU fan that sufficiently cooled my 6x86. Before that, I was using
the fan that came seperately from my 6x86. The case was lying sideways with
the cover off.
Problem 2: One BIOS upgrade might have attributed to floppy drive problems
not unlike what happened with the DX4-100. The March 24, 1997 BIOS is the
good one for the P55-VX.
I also got an
NEC MultiSpin 8V (8x) CD-ROM drive. Specs: 140ms access time,
1.2MB/sec. data transfer.
I got a Western Digital
Caviar 22100 Hard Drive in late February. Fast, but
reliable? Read about it.
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