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Building a PC to die for - one man’s experience My own “PC To Die For” evolved separately from SILICON CHIP’s machine, described in recent issues. Here’s a look at the hardware used in my machine and how the problems were solved. By STEPHEN DAVIS 74  Silicon Chip www.siliconchip.com.au F OR QUITE A FEW MONTHS before the publication of your arti­cle “A PC To Die For”, I had been monitoring the prices of com­ puter memory, CPUs and peripherals and waiting for the time when the items I wanted became more affordable. I spent a lot of time on the Internet reading hardware reviews, specifications and product comparisons and independently of Greg Swain, I slowly evolved a plan for a computer that was very similar to the one described in SILICON CHIP. Basically, I wanted good performance but I also wanted value for money. After weighing up all the options, I decided on a machine that contained the following parts: (1) Microprocessor: 1.2GHz AMD Athlon (256MHz fsb) My main reason for this choice is that the Athlon CPU costs less than the equivalent Pentium. I ended up buying the 1.2GHz Athlon because it seemed to offer the best compromise between price and performance in the Athlon range. At $275, I was happy with the purchase price, especially since the price a month earlier had been around $400. The only disadvantage of the AMD chip that I could find is that they run hotter than the equivalent Pentium and so they require more effective cooling. They also require more power but that’s not a problem provided you choose a big enough power supply. (2) CPU cooling fan: Coolermaster EP5-6I11 In choosing a CPU cooling fan, I wanted a fan that was both powerful and quiet (I hate noisy computers). The cooler the chip runs, the greater the reliability or, if you are into over­ clock­ing, the more you can overclock it. Of course, these attributes are usually regarded as being mutually exclusive, because the more powerful the fan is, the noisier it generally is and vice-versa. Taking price into account as well, the best compromise seemed to be the Coolermaster EP5-6111. It is a ball-bearing fan and has excellent specifications, both with respect to noise and heat dissipation, beating more expensive (and more “hyped”) cool­ers. The lower www.siliconchip.com.au An AMD Athlon 1.2GHz CPU and an Asus A7V133 motherboard (below, left) are at the heart of the system. “specced” Coolermaster DP5-6H51 fan actually ships with boxed versions of the Thunderbird processor but this has nowhere near the specifications of the “E” range of coolers. As an added bonus, this cooler comes with a special clip that makes it far easier to attach to the CPU than many other coolers. At $45, this seemed a reasonable amount to pay for a good quality fan. (3) Motherboard: Asus A7V133 with RAID The main reason I chose this motherboard was that it had received excellent reviews, incorporated the well-regarded VIA KT133 chipset and supported PC133 SDRAM (the cost of this type of memory being at an all-time low). As well, having two extra EIDE slots (thanks to the Promise Ultra ATA100 controller) means that up to eight hard disk drives, CDROMs or DVDs can be attached to this motherboard. And even if this option is not fully utilised, there are other advantages in having the extra slots. For example, four hard drives or ATAPI devices with differ­ ent specifications can all be single masters on their own EIDE channel. This allows all devices to work at their maximum poten­ tial, without being hampered by slave devices. A CD-ROM and CD burner can be connected to different channels (instead of as slave and master), making burning more efficient and reliable. As well, in the BIOS, you can choose whether you wish to boot from a floppy, a CD, the primary EIDE channel, the secondary EIDE channel or from one of the Promise Ultra ATA100 channels. This means that you can have several hard disks in your computer and at bootup, you can choose which hard drive you wish to boot from – eg, you might have two or more operating systems that you wish to boot from but you don’t want the complication of a single multi-boot disk. An excellent idea for people with children who also use the same computer is to get a hard disk drawer, install a second hard drive in it and make that the child’s hard drive. When the child wants to use the computer, he/she just plugs this drive in and the computer boots from that without touching “Dad’s” hard drive. This is easily set up in the BIOS by setting the boot sequence to: (1) Child’s hard drive; (2) Dad’s hard drive. Of course, if the child’s hard drive is not present, it will boot to Dad’s hard drive with no extra effort. (4) Memory: 3 x 256MB Hyundai PC133 SDRAM At the time of buying the parts for this computer, 256MB DIMM modules were selling for $79, with some retailers selling Hyundai RAM for this price. This brand of RAM has a good reputa­tion for reliability and so $79 was very good value, especially considering that much of the RAM being sold for this price in many stores was generic “no-brand” RAM. Thinking that I may be getting into multimedia at some stage, I bought three “sticks” of this memory to fill up all of the memory slots in the Asus October 2001  75 motherboard. It may have been overkill to buy this much memory but at that price, I couldn’t resist it. It pays to shop around when buying RAM. A friend of mine, who is in the process of building a similar system, found that he had to pay a premium ($90 vs $69) in order to obtain Hyundai memory. in fact, than the internal PCI modem in my old computer. PUTTING IT TOGETHER (5) Video Card: Eagle GeForce2 MX400 (64MB) Originally, I wanted one of the Matrox cards with video capture but their $600 price range dampened my enthusiasm. As a compromise, I ended up choosing the Geforce2 MX400 card, with the thought of obtaining a video capture card at some time in the future. I bought a generic card (Eagle) after I was advised that there is not much difference between the generic cards and the big brandname cards, especially since they all use the Nvidia chipset. According to some sources, 64MB of video RAM is overkill but the cost differential between 64MB and 32MB was small enough to persuade me to go for the larger amount of memory. According to several sources on the Internet, there is enough of a performance difference between the MX200 and the MX400 to justify spending the extra money for the latter. (6) Floppy Disk Drive: a Panasonic for $30 seemed good value to me. (7) CD-ROM Drive: a 52-speed Sony for $75 is a reasonable price to pay for a low-noise CD-ROM drive. (8) Sound Card: Soundblaster Live Value! The cost of $95 speaks for itself. (9) Hard Disk Drive: 60GB Deskstar IBM ATA 7200 RPM 60GXP This hard disk was my choice because, despite its high rotational speed, it’s quieter and generates less heat than equivalent models. The Deskstar series also have a reputation for being well made and the price premium over equivalent brands appeared to be relatively minor. I paid $430 for this drive. (10) Monitor: Auriga 19CF 19-inch When I first saw this monitor selling for $549, I thought that this must be another cheap generic monitor not worth wasting money on. However, when I checked it out on the Internet, I was surprised to find that its specifications were really quite good. Among other things, this monitor 76  Silicon Chip Swann’s 56KB USB modem is a good performer. boasts an Hitachi picture tube with a dot pitch of 0.22mm, has a maximum resolution of 1600 x 1200 <at> 76Hz, and scanning frequencies of 30-98kHz horizontally and 50-160Hz vertically. In the end, I decided that it was too good to pass up for this price. (11) Speakers: Altec Lansing AC554 A cost of $170 speaks for itself. These are a good set of multimedia speakers. (12) Case: Aopen HQ08 Full Tower This case has had very good reviews. The panel that holds the motherboard can slide right out of the box, the box itself is well made with no sharp edges, and it comes with a 300W power supply (recommended for Athlon CPUs). I chose a full tower because they are easier to work in, cooling is less of an issue, and the thought of not having to worry about space for extra disk drives, etc is very appealing. This case was purchased for $190. (13) Modem: Swann 56KB USB Modem Swann modems have a good reputation and I wanted a USB modem to avoid the need for a separate power supply. There are discussions on the Internet as to whether USB modems are more unreliable than serial bus modems, with some people claiming that they suffer more dropouts than the latter. However, it appears that dropouts on a USB bus are only likely to occur if the bus is shared with other peripherals and the USB power supply is over­loaded. Because my mouse and keyboard are both PS/2 devices, I couldn’t see myself sharing the USB bus with other peripherals while I was on the Internet. In the end, I bought the Swann USB modem for $115 and I am happy to report that it works fine – far better, The assembly of my machine was uneventful and proceeded in a similar fashion to Greg Swain’s article “A PC To Die For”, in the June 2001 issue of SILICON CHIP. Of course, in order to partition and format the IBM hard drive, it had to be on the primary IDE port on the motherboard to begin with. But rather than use the old fashioned fdisk and format utilities, I used “IBM Disk Manager 2000”, which I down­loaded from IBM’s website. Booting from a floppy disk containing this program and following the on-screen prompts allowed me to create four equal-sized partitions on my 60GB hard drive and format them all within the space of five minutes! I then used a utility downloaded from the Internet called “Memtest 86” to test my RAM modules. Intermittent crashes due to faulty RAM can be very frustrating (and difficult to track down) and I wanted to give my RAM a clean bill of health so that I could rule it out as a possible cause if I encountered instabili­ty problems later on. Over the next six hours, I allowed this utility to thor­oughly test my RAM. No errors were found I am happy to say. The address for the Memtest 86 download is: www.memtest86.com Invalid page faults Next, the installation of Windows 98SE (my preferred oper­ating system) proceeded uneventfully and I was pleased that there appeared to be no problems during this phase. The first program I installed on my computer was “Norton System Works” and although there was a couple of “freezes” during the installation, I even­tually completed the procedure. The problems really started with some sort of conflict that appeared to be caused by the Soundblaster Live card. Random errors such as “SBLIVEXP caused an invalid page fault in kernel32. dll” occurred whenever I tried to use the soundcard’s software. My first approach was to download and install the latest Via 4-in-1 drivers, along with the latest drivers for the video card and the Soundblaster card. At the same time, I downloaded the driver for the Promise Ultra ATA100 www.siliconchip.com.au controller, so that the hard disk drive could eventually be transferred to an Ultra ATA100 EIDE slot. Unfortunately, this made no difference to the errors and even installing the sound card in PCI slot 3 which only shares its interrupt with the modem riser (not used) did not help. At this point, I was grateful that I had cleared the RAM as a possible cause of problems. I was starting to wonder whether a BIOS upgrade may be the answer, when I saw a copy of the August edition of SILICON CHIP in my local newsagent. It was a joy to purchase this magazine and read Greg Swain’s article. I must admit that I was pleased to know that I was not alone in my frustrations. There is nothing worse than the gnawing fear that there is something wrong with one of the com­ponents you have bought and it is up to you to find out which component it is. Anyway, although my symptoms were not the same as the symp­toms described in Greg Swain’s article (ie, I was not getting random lockups), I decided to follow his advice and upgrade the BIOS. My original version of the BIOS was avu1002a.awd – exactly the same as the original BIOS in Greg’s machine. Upgrading the BIOS One thing that can go wrong with a BIOS upgrade is a power failure right in the middle of it. This is unlikely so I did not go to the extreme of obtaining an uninterruptible power supply. However, I did take the precaution of running “scandisk” on the floppy containing the upgrade (avu1005a. awd) and believe it or not, there was an unreadable sector right in the middle of the avu1005a.awd file. This surely has to be a more likely cause of update failures than a power disruption. I unzipped the original avu1005a.awd file onto another floppy disk, checked it again and used this for the BIOS upgrade. The update went smoothly but I do admit that I wouldn’t want to do it too often – it’s a stressful 20 seconds. After the BIOS upgrade, I rebooted my computer only to be greeted with the message “There is not enough memory to run Norton Antivirus”. I ran “Norton System Doctor” and it showed that my GDI resources, user resources, swapfile and RAM were all OK – as you would expect with nearly www.siliconchip.com.au 800MB of memory! The conventional memory, however, was non-existent and as a result of this, random crashes still occurred while using Sound­ blaster Live! utilities. I then tried to open a command prompt by double-clicking command.com, only to be greeted with the error message “There is not enough memory to run this program”. In fact, this message would occur even if I used the Wind­ows system configuration utility to turn off every background program except Explorer and Systray and then reboot the computer with only these two essentials running in the background. At this stage, I decided to reformat my hard drive, rein­stall the operating system and add the drivers and programs one-by-one until I found out what was causing this problem. After the installation of each individual driver, I tested the installation by trying to open a DOS prompt. A clue at last It was only when I installed the Soundblaster drivers that the out-of-memory errors started to occur. This would happen whether I used the most recent drivers or the ones released a couple of years ago. This was confusing to me, because I could find no reports of this sort of thing happening with other simi­lar systems employing the Soundblaster Live! I was starting to think that it might be some strange hardware fault masquerading as a software fault. Of course, the next course of action was to go to the Crea­tive or Sound­ blaster website to see if there were any answers from product support. The answer was not immediately forthcoming but somehow I ended up at a site www.americas.creative.com/ sup­port where I somehow entered the right technical help search parameters and found an article which led to article Q253/9/12 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. The name of this article is “Out of Memory Error Messages With Large Amounts of RAM Installed.” Apparently, any computer running Windows 95/98/ Me with more than 512M of RAM may experi­ence lockups or out of memory messages. This IBM’s Deskstar hard disk drive. is because of an incorrect algorithm used by Vcache in determining maximum cache size based on the amount of RAM installed in the computer. The cure for this bug is to reduce the amount of memory that Vcache uses to 25% of the system RAM by putting in a Max­FileCache setting in system.ini. In my case, with 768MB of RAM the setting is as follows: [vcache] MinFileCache=196608 MaxFileCache=196608 Anyway, I performed all the required modifications and my computer now works like a charm. It is as smooth as silk and as stable and solid as a rock. It has taken a lot of hours and some psychological stress to get this computer working but if people ask me if it was all worthwhile, the answer SC would have to be ... YES! October 2001  77