Although I say upgrade, it's really a replacement.  This weekend, I upgraded my main workstation, tacolinux, from an AMD Athlon64 3200+ to an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700.  The new system has been christened destiny.  I took some photos of the process.

The system is very fast, yet stays cool and quiet, most of the time.  Here are some specs:

• Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700
• Intel D975XBX2 Motherboard
• 2GB DDR2 PC2-5300 Crucial Ballistix
• EVGA 256-P2-N549-TR GeForce 7600GS
• Western Digital WD1600JS-41S (160GB SATA 3.0Gb/sec)
• Zalman CNPS9500 LED
• Antec Phantom 500

There are a few outstanding issues, though.

First off, the system won't boot from the hard disk, at all.  Don't get me wrong, it reads it fine, but the BIOS just won't boot from it.  I've fooled around with AHCI settings in the BIOS until I was blue in the face, and flashed it while I was at it.  The old SATA disk from tacolinux doesn't boot, either.  The workaround for the moment to use a GRUB bootable CD-ROM.  So, basically, I have to type two commands to get my system to boot.  I suppose it can be viewed as security through obscurity?

The other open item relates to hardware monitoring.  I believe there's a Windows application that displays data from thermal sensors and fans, but I couldn't get lm_sensors to pick up anything useful.  More research is needed.

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