ASUS Essentio CM6870 Desktop Upgrade

 I bought my used ASUS Essentio desktop computer about a year ago and it was one of my most read posts. So, I thought I would post an update because I decided to upgrade it recently, despite saying that I wasn't going to spend any money updating a 10-year-old computer. In April I noticed that one of my hard drives was starting to make clicking noises. I did backup my home directory to an external drive before the HD failed a few weeks later. Turns out it was an old 250 GB Seagate drive that I was using to store backups and not the 500 GB main Seagate drive with Windows 10 installed.

 

A mechanical hard drive is like a car. It has an internal odometer that keeps track of how many hours it has been spinning. I know the one that failed was at least 12 years old. The average hard disk lasts somewhere between 3 and 5 years. I decided to check the run time on the main drive using SeaTools from Seagate. The main drive passed all tests, but it showed over 58000 hours or 6.6 years of run time. I knew that the drive could fail soon, so I had to find a replacement. 

I normally buy Samsung SSD's, but this time I decided to save a few bucks and went with a Crucial MX500 SSD instead. The MX drive is a step up from their BX model. The 500 GB version was $59, including tax and free shipping. The installation was fairly easy. Just remove the failed drive and use the cables to plug in the new drive. Then clone the data on the main drive using free Acronis software from the Crucial website. I then unplugged the old main drive and left it in the PC as a backup. Solid state drives can also fail. There are no clicking noises to let you know that the drive is going bad. It will have trouble reading data or just fail completely without warning. So far the MX500 is working well, but I wasn't done upgrading yet. I had room for another 4 GB of RAM!

The 12 GB of RAM in the system was made by SK Hynix. They are a South Korean company and the second largest memory chipmaker in the world after Samsung. Good memory, but I wanted something faster. I found a deal on a used 16 GB Corsair Vengeance RAM upgrade kit that would fit in my system. Normally this kit sells for around $40. But I thought $30 was a better price. The RAM arrived in good shape, despite being a little dusty. It took a bit of effort to get the old RAM out of the PC. I imagine it was the original 12 GB RAM installed by ASUS. The new RAM snapped in without any trouble. The Corsair Vengance RAM is supposed to have improved timing and a higher 1600 Mhz clock speed. But my PC was showing 1333 Mhz instead of 1600 Mhz. I found out that in order to get the higher frequency, you have to go into your BIOS and enable XMP (Extreme Memory Profile). I couldn't find an XMP setting in my BIOS, but there is a performance mode that I haven't tried yet. I don't really need 1600 Mhz, I mainly wanted the extra 4 GB and of course the cool looking blue anodized heat sinks!