W00t, finally something went my way; well mostly. With me, you can always expect at least something to go wrong.

Anyways, I went with the new/old router upgrade.

I gathered the parts I needed: an old ASUS M4N82 (Socket AM2+, DDR2 Ram, PCI-E, SATA2), 4 x 1GB Corsair XMS DDR2-800.

And then went to MSY for the rest.

Now I went into this with the hope that the motherboard would support headless (without display/kb/mouse), but unfortunately it refuses to boot without a graphics card plugged in, and again unfortunately the only card I had on hand is an 8800GTS (not exactly a power saver). It does however work without a keyboard and mouse.

 

At MSY (Mitcham) I was greeted with an interesting change: they’ve turned it into a regular computer store/showroom. So instead of just asking for what I wanted, I ended up having to look for it myself (less the CPU which was behind the counter).

Anyways, I left the store with an AMD Sempron 140 2.7Ghz (which I later unlocked using NVIDIA Unleashed mode [ACC] in the bios giving me a dual-core processor), and a Vantec ION2 460w Silent PSU. Total cost $76.

When I got home, I ripped out the old motherboard, CPU, RAM and PSU, and (quite quickly) threw in all the new components.

Amazingly the only issues were that the PSU was too tall (and required a *clears throat* case modification -see pic below)

 

Case Mod

Hehehe… there’s nothing you can’t fix with a hammer and a hacksaw 😀

Anyway, the transition was almost completely transparent. I just changed the boot order so that the IDE drive boots first, and let it go. Not a problem 😛

Only change I needed to make was to run IPFires’ setup command and reassign the new onboard gigabit port to the green0 network. Other than that, it continues to work as I type, just as it did before.
As the reason for this change was to enable me to use the media drive, I quickly did some tests to ensure that I now have proper speeds and that copying in both directions worked. They did!
I am now able to copy from the media drive at 80MB/s, which isn’t too bad for a Western Digital Green drive.

Currently my only problem is that it’s getting too hot. This is the most part caused by the graphics card, a problem that will be rectified next week when I take delivery of a second hand eBay PCI graphics card. It was either that or I buy the cheapest PCIe card which is gonna be around the $60 mark, which frankly isn’t worth it.