Parts?
 

Does anyone have any preference at all in buying computer parts? I'm talking about stuff like motherboard combos, nice cases, etc. I don't want to have to wait for the damn computer show to come around again...

As in companies? types? what exactly do you mean?

Yeah, vendors. I know about Pricewatch, but I don't know if I can stand just going and buying something from a random hole in the wall place. Back when I knew about such things, we'd get reports about one of the local vendors who would repackage bad boards and sell them again, things like that, that's all I want to avoid. I know there's no way around things like "restocking fees" and I'm willing to roll the dice that I get good parts, but...

As far as what parts, I'm looking at various mobo combos with Athlon 1.33s. That seems to be the best price/performance ratio right now.

I also want to swap out a p3-500 I have with the cheapest available Duron board, whatever that currently is. That box hardly needs to do anything (it does run G@H of course), but I need it to survive. Right now it is intermittently alarming, every few days, probably from some sort of fan failure or temperature problem.

I also need a new SCSI drive for the system that runs the Cellar. So um I guess I do need a pretty good number of parts.

Ebay and Halted
 

Sometimes it's good to live in the Silicon Valley, but Ebay works pretty well. I have yet to be disappointed by an Ebay purchase. My SCSI chain is SCSI-II UW, but since U2W has largely taken over it's easy to get enormous SCSI-II drives for cheap ($88 for a new 18GB drive that's fast enough to give Pro/Engineer a crunchy feel). My DDS-3 tape drive is from Ebay, $175. For these prices you can afford to take a couple of chances.

Halted Specialties, known to many Silicon Valley development types, sells, well, junk. But the junk often works well enough to get things done. I buy a lot of odds and ends there.

If you have to send away for stuff you can do a lot worse than to check Reseller Ratings before you buy anything.

well...with the athlons it depends if you want DDR or SD ram as much as anythign else, for DDR teh SiS chipset is damn godd, as well as the AMD 760, MSI make nice DDR boards, the only SiS chipset one i've seen here is Elite buthey, were a technological backwater.
Try Toms Hardware they are THE hardware review place.

Re: Ebay and Halted
 

Halted? Is that the place on Lawrence & Central?

A lot of my evil hacker friends and I build stuff from Tiger Direct parts....Only problem I've ever had is an internal modem which came crushed. The box was smashed, too, so I had a nice long talk with the delivery service and Tiger, and eventually got my money back. Other than that, no troubles at all

That was the god of logic seeking revenge on you for buying an internal modem in the first place =P
jk

Is this for coloc machines or?
If its mission critical i'd get an MSI board for athlon, slower but far more reliable.

Parts and all that
 

Speaking as someone who just got a lot in,

For memory, I've been going to Coast To Coast Memory (they advertise on Pricewatch). I went to them initially to get a RAM module for my Compaq 486 laptop. They were the only people in the US who had the 24MB RAM module.

Hey, when you've got to do browser testing on a 486 to test out speed of Javascript execution, accept no substitutes.

I actually just got in a large amount of RAM from them this morning also. I have had no problem with them.

For parts, I turn to eBay a lot for specific ones I need, especially the specialized server parts.

I'll also go to Dirt Cheap Drives, since they WILL have parts in stock for darn near anything SCSI made.

However, eBay looks better and better each day :)

Mitch

It's not really for critical server use. Although my machines are on 24x7 anyway. Now having read up on the motherboards, I was thinking either Asus, Abit, or Iwill. I tend towards Asus because the Asus I used to build my personal machine 4 years ago has been phenomenal.

Asus
 

Toad,

ASUS = Rock Solid for AMD and Intel.

Did I mention my sister's old NT Workstation? She was running a Celeron 433 with 128 MB (later 320 MB) RAM, NT Workstation Service Pack 5 (later 6a), based on an Asus P3B-F 440BX chipset motherboard and all generic parts? Oh yeah, and Office 97 and the other fun things that a college-age girl needs to function, such as ICQ, AOL IM, and the happy things.

She left it on an average of 4 months at a time. I kid not. I turned it off to upgrade parts and install Service Pack 6a.

I haven't seen a workstation YET take that type of abuse without seriously crashing.

Her new Athlon has an ASUS. Gee, I wonder why? :).

I've seen ASUS motherboards take abuse that would make any other manufacturer's die. Case in point was that Celeron.

Mitch

Halted? Is that the place on Lawrence & Central?

Yep.

Apropos of nothing, lisa, ever heard of General Lasertronics? Place I used to work.... <g>

As far as resallers go, try here.

My personal favorite is Multiwave, even though they don't have the lowest prices around. I found their customer service to be above par. Once one of my mobos was fried (one of the wires from system fan came loose!) and it happend one day prior to it being a year since the day I placed an order with them. I called them and got a new mobo at no extra cost..

Depends which ASUS board for AMD chips.
Whatever you do _do not_ couple an A7V with a SB LIve....the amount of problems this causes is truely incredible. The ASUS board based on the 760 chipset is nice, but the Ali-Magic chipset is aparantly having a few problems.

Ie been building 3 Rackmount boxs that are destined for SQL servers (Intel Chips) and ihave to say some of my faith has been restored. But avoid Promise controllers, pieces of shit if i ever saw any.

Thanks all around. Hey, serge, that Multiwave has ann odd web site, but they really have a nice approach for their mobo combo section. You pick the manufacturer you want, pick the board you want, pick the memory you want, pick the CPU you want... it's very nicely set up and I think I will wind up going with them. Thanks!

Re: Parts?
 

Let me put in a good word for Newegg. I'd heard about these folks on both the AV Science forums and AMD Zone. Their prices always seem to be among the lowest. They sell lots of OEM stuff, so most drives will come bare.

I just ordered stuff for my own homebrew rig from them a couple of weeks ago. I'm very happy with the result. Good e-mail communication, prompt shipping -- took about a day from when I put in the order to when it actually shipped -- low S&H rates compared to other on-line stores, and everything arrived well-packed and in good condition. I'm pretty happy with them, and I'll buy there again.

Tony, do let us all know what/where you get when you get it and how it works out for you. I'm sure there are others, like me, who are watching others' responses to this thread and interested in the same kind of question for when WE upgrade. :)

The upgrade is now in place. An Athlon 1400 on an Abit KG7. Tom of Tom's Hardware made me go Abit; the beautiful jumperless approach is so amazing.

I got them pre-assembled from that mwave.com. With 256MB of spankin' DDR memory. Total price: $317.

Today it arrived and 5 minutes later I was installing it. To my surprise, the board that had been in this system was smaller by about two inches. The layout meant that the memory sticks on the Abit miss the drive bay by about a milllimeter. Well that could've been worse, but you can't figure everything out in an upgrade like this...

Somehow the cabling worked out OK, with one floppy, two IDE drives and two different IDE CD - one for burning work.

The case's connectors don't fit this motherboard, so I'm forced to go the crude route of cutting - with an art knife - the connectors apart. This system started its life at MicroCenter, so this oddity is a problem with cost-cutting.

I should say, the documentation with the Abit is excellent. A printed BOOK
comes with this motherboard, and it's not a catch-all book either - it's specifically for this board. A+ for docs, which helped out several times.

Put everything together, turn it on and I'm immediately trying out the funky BIOS settings. One of the settings will shut the system down if the CPU fan quits. There's a good idea! I enable it.

Save the settings, reboot, and the machine shuts down. Hit the power switch. The machine comes on for a second, then shuts off. I check the CPU fan. It's spinning.

I short the jumper to reset the BIOS - one jumper that even the jumperless motherboard can't do without. Now the machine comes to life. It turns out that the CPU fan was plugged into a different connector. The system thought the CPU fan speed was 0 no matter what it actually was.

I had to recall some of the settings and probably have some tuning to do, to get the most out of this system.

After a while I realize that I'm not hearing anything. Damn, turns out the sound card isn't producing sound.

I try to debug this through the Win device manager, but I can't make head or tail of what the difference is between the different devices. I try changing the PCI slot. It takes a lot of time to move a card from one slot to another, accompanied by various WinME discoveries and installations of "new" devices. In the final attempt, the system just hangs.

I then realize that it's all just a result of having a cruddy no-name sound card. I head directly out and buy a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz for real money. It was about $79. But I have always wanted to have a good sound card. This one seems to be excellent. And it comes with a pretty nice jukebox/mp3 manager.

I went from a P3-750 on a cheap mainboard, to an Athlon 1400 on a quality mainboard with a new speedy bus etc. So I have more than doubled my computing power. (Arr! Arr!) But do I NOTICE? Well, Win's desktop has always been as snappy as it could be; Mozilla was rendering damn fast anyway; and Notepad positively smokes.

Actually, in Unreal Tournament, I notice more of a difference than I thought I would see.

A quick update: at load, with one side of the case off, the CPU is running 57 degrees C.

From all that I've read, it is vitally important with the AMD chips to have good, solid cooling. 57 degrees is near the point of being too hot. And I shouldn't have to keep the case open, although where it sits under my desk, it doesn't matter to me.

So now I have to wonder whether I should go out and buy a better cooling situation and/or a different case and/or different fans, etc.

Has anyone gone through the process of removing old thermal paste and installing new paste and a new heatsink? Is it a painful process?

The one thing with an Athlon....
 

From personal experience with a TBird Athlon,

It runs MUCH faster, noticably faster, under Win2K. It's as if you can see the difference by a large factor over 98SE/Me.

Nvidia drivers like it a lot as well. Faith's Athlon just runs, and runs very well using the Detonator drivers.

Thermal paste
 

If the box was truly cheap it's not surprising the heatsink was sub-optimal. I have been very pleased with the TennMax cooling devices, my OpenBSD-powered I-Opener has a Lasagna fan and no other heatsink, and its uptime is in the hundreds of days now.

IIRC Athlons are not as flat as Intel processors. This implies you need more, not less, thermal paste to fill the gaps. There's a balancing act here. You want as little thermal paste as you can get away with (thermal paste, while good, isn't as good a conductor of heat as metal is, so you minimize the amount) but you want as much as you need to get contact everywhere.

The good paste is the messiest, most disgusting material ever packaged. It comes in a silver tube with a blue sticker on it (sorry, I don't have one to hand right now, so I can't tell you the mfr.) It will get everywhere and it is hard to remove from things. Wear old clothes, do not let the pets near it. Get four times as many wiping cloths (use cloth, not paper towels) as you think you could possibly use and have them ready before you ever remove the old heatsink or open the new tube of thermal paste.

Take the heatsink off and put it on one of the wiping cloths. Look at the pattern of how the old paste got smooshed out on the CPU and heatsink, see if there were any gaps or voids. If you applied the paste yourself, and you see you didn't use enough, well, use that knowledge when re-applying the new stuff.

Now try to remove as much of the old stuff as you can, unless you know it is the same as the new stuff you'll be applying (mixing oil-based things from different manufacturers can result in a sticky mess from incompatible oils).

Spread the new compound on whichever part (heatsink or CPU) you think is easier. I always put it on the heatsink. Try to smooth it out as best you can, you don't want any voids. Move everything slowly, if you go too fast, the thermal paste will sort of stick together and make thin blobs that often cover voids.

Carefully, evenly and slowly, smoosh the heatsink down onto the CPU. If you have done it just right a tiny bead of the thermal compound will ooze out all around the edge of the heatsink. If the bead is very small you can leave it alone but it is usually worth trying to remove. Flatten a thin soda straw or hollow coffee stirrer, cut the end at a 45 degree angle, push it down so it's oval, and use the cut-off point to sort of shovel the material out of the gap. If you get no bead at all, you used too little thermal paste and now you are really going to have a mess, because you'll have to separate the parts again and add more paste.

Thermal paste is a very bad solution but unfortunately every other solution is worse. There are BN-loaded rubber patches sold by Shin-Etsu that work pretty well if you have the time to design the interface and order the right thickness of material (and can afford it) but IMHO that solution is over the top for a PC.

Tony - I'm a Quake III Arena guy, but let's do UT some time, eh? :) I get spanked at it, so you'll have a fun time beating my ass.

Secondly - one thing I've learned over being a hardware nut for however long I have been is that you do NOT want to side of the case off. I promise you this is a bad idea. Just like you don't want to have any of the slot covers on the back out. Everyone talks about "well, it's there for ventilation" - no no no no no, unless you have a box fan beside the computer blowing out or something. Here's why it's bad:

Computer cases, believe it or not, are designed so that air comes in the front and goes out the back. The fans in the back (you have more than one in the PSU, right?) pull air in through the cracks in the front, etc. This cooler air flows over hard drives, near the processor, over that hot ass video card of yours and out the back. If you have the side off, the air is pulled in from the side, misses the peripherals and goes out the back. If you have a PCI slot cover off, it just goes straight up and out. Maybe your sound card gets some extra cooling, but that wasn't overheating anyway :)

Now, unless it's absolutely freezing in your house (or colder than it is in mine), having the side of the case off will result in higher temperatures around your critical components. Sad but true.

What I recommend - Athlons do run grossly hot, but you NEED a good cooler on there. Did you know that a 1.4GHz Thunderbird will burn itself up within a SECOND of the fan/heatsink falling off/failing, in the process reaching over SIX HUNDRED degrees fahrenheight, likely ruining your motherboard and causing a fire hazard as well? That thing needs to be cooled, and it needs to be cooled well. Read reviews of heatsinks over at http://www.gideontech.com and that like. Find one that's gonna keep that temperature down, and then get it. Peltier == good. Don't cringe at spending $35 for a good fan/heatsink combo - worth it. I promise.

As far as extra cooling... try and stick 2 80MM fans in the back, blowing out. And maybe 1 or 2 in the front, blowing in. I'm going to put a "blowhole" in the top of the next machine I build (dual athlons, probably done by the end of November - I'll keep you guys posted if you like) - the blowhole being a 120MM fan in the top, blowing out, keeping all that hot air out of my system. These are actually relatively easy to do. There are instructions at Gideon Tech (linked above) that you can see.

Lastly, aluminum cases don't hurt either. I prefer Lian Li (the Lian Li PC12 is what I'm building my next machine into). They're kinda expensive, but they're the best cases on the market.

i was quite suprised by the Antec 1030 black case that i got. its got a log of nice features, like the side panel has handel to open it. its very big and heavy, but the only thing that i found bad on it that the door to the case sometimes gets in teh way, but its all good, and that i find dead bugs in it due to the airflow. it just sucks things in.

i also have a logitech trackman wheel mouse. well, its a trackball. i recommend it cause not only is it better, but its really cool. it glows red.

Hey Ham-ster, I'm not against blowing up any particular individual but I really am overdue for putting up a UT server here. That's what I should really do.

But since you've played both, what do you think of the differences? Can you go directly from one to the other, or do you have to spend a half hour getting warmed up and used to the different mouse feel?

TBirds do need very good cooling, if it isin't a towercase, get one of those huge swifttech motherfuckers weighing in at 700g or so, they work fantasticly. it not? Peltier or watercooling if your brave, or wind tunnel. FIll the front of the case with fan blocks, every spare bay, etracting. PLace one in the side of the case, extracting, then a few in the back, taking in. WOrks wonders, and make your cables really neat to imporve airflow.

UT servers are cool. I have a quake3/web/whatever server (and all the images i post are off that) down in mississippi. my mixed capitalization is silly. anyway. yah, that'd be cool to do. we could play. :)

as far as the differences, there are a lot. quake3 is way more tweakable. which is cool, but also crummy. cool because you can tailor it to your liking more than you can ut. bad because a person that has it tweaked has an advantage over a regular player. so basically that just serves to widen the gap.

i can go from one to the other, but like i said, i don't play ut often. i play q3 tournaments and leagues and whatnot, but not ut. q3 just fits my style of play better. but ut isn't at all bad. i have the mouse set up much the same. quake's feel is different, but i switch between them pretty easily. 5 minutes to warm up and i'm good to go :)

also... i find q3's graphics vastly superior... the weapons are more balanced (the flak cannon, for instance, is GROSSLY overpowered - that's why i like it so much :) ), the levels are more even... but the biggest thing is the physics... i find the "feel" of q3 much more comfortable. for instance, you can control yourself more in the air in UT than you can in q3. sort of how you could in quake. you know, running forward, jumping and then hitting strafe right so you go right-forward instead of just straight. it's not as drastic in q3.

also, there's no strafe jumping/circle strafe jumping in UT... and there is in q3... and that's something i'm used to... so q3 feels about 4x faster than UT... UT just feels slow...

and then there's the issue of framerates... UT pegs low framerates, while i'm steady over 100fps in q3... aye...

anyway... if you wanna chat on icq some time about playing or whatever, my uin is 1137280 (from WAY back in the day, awwwww yeah)... drop me a message... we'll play :)