GENERALMELCHETT, my main PC ‘ride’ was built in late 2007. The General is named in homage to the great character played by Stephen Fry in Blackadder. A few upgrades of video cards, one processor update to the Q9300 and some hard disk shenanigans resulted in a nice stable PC.

This month, Intel started shipping their “second generation” Core i7 series.

The General, having served well on the front lines for 38 months; well, it was time for an upgrade.

Part 2 of the upgrade involves installing an SSD. Budget requires that to be accomplished sometime in February.

Part 1 involved:

• Intel Core i7 2600 running at 3.4Ghz (up from the 2.4Ghz of the Q9300)
• 16Gb of DDR3 RAM (surprisingly cheap!)
• Gigabyte P67 SATA3/USB3 motherboard

After 30 minutes of hardware surgery, the new GENERAL booted Windows 7 x64; from the same hard drive used in the old machine. A few drivers were installed; the ATI video card reconfigured itself, restart.

In about 45 minutes – I had a new heart in the old GENERAL.

Performance differences:

• MahTweets compiles 20% faster
• WEI scores 7.6 for CPU and 7.9 for memory.
• Passmark rating increase as shown above (red is the old GENERAL)

• significant boost in memory performance