Phenom II x4 955

Often, in the past, I under-appreciated the importance of having a quality power supply (PSU) in my computer builds. Recently, my home office (read: gaming) computer began to have intermittent hard drive failures.

I was running three SATA HDDs, including a Western-Digital Raptor 150gb 10,000 rpm drive and a SATA DVD burner. My PSU did not deliver consistent power on the 12v rail and every so often one of the drives would not be detected. To remedy this, I decided to shop for a single-rail PSU.

Single-rail units deliver their advertised wattage on a single rail. Multiple rail units may have several rails that added together equal the advertised wattage. Lower end multi-rail PSUs may not put out sufficient wattage to drive power hungry components such as high rpm hard drives or powerful video cards unless you carefully balance which rails supply power to your components.

I went with a Corsair 650tx PSU in my build and connected it to an ASUS M4A79XTD EVO AM3 motherboard. I was impressed by the price point of the Phenom II quad core processors at the time, this was before the I5 hit the market, and decided to build around an AMD Phenom II x4 955 processor. Apart from these core pieces, I reused most of my other components including the optical and hard drives.

My previous video card was an ATI HD4850, which was an excellent mid-range card a year ago. Instead of upgrading to a more powerful card, I added an additional HD4850 to the system in a Crossfire configuration. This has greatly increased the ability of my system to play 3D games. In fact, the only limiting factor I have is that the relatively low video memory sometimes struggles to keep up with full HD resolution (1920x1080).

Installation was relatively simple. I reused my trusty Antec Sonata case. The motherboard went in cleanly, the PSU cables were long enough to reach all the connectors and stored out of the way to give the case good air flow. I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of issues with this build. The only complaint that I have is that after extended gaming sessions, the original 4850 video card heats up quite a bit. I may have to consider some extra cooling or ventilation solutions to help deal with this.