Built Your Own Computer Check This Out

System:
AMD Athlon XP1600+ 1.4GHz
Abit KG7-RAID motherboard with the AMD761 NorthBridge and VIA 686b Southbridge
2*256MB Corsair PC2400 DDRRAM CAS 2
ASUS V7100 GeForce2 MX 32MB... now changed with MSI GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB
SoundBlaster Live! Value soundcard
Sitecom Realtek 10/100 Mb/s networkcard
2*Seagate Barracude IV 20GB ATA100 7200rpm disks (RAID 0 versions) running RAID 0
Maxtor DiamondMax 60 15.3GB 7200rpm ATA66
Seagate Medialist ATA33 6GB
ASUS CD-S500/A CDROM 50x
Toshiba DVDROM SMD-1502 46x/16x
HP CDRW 9500b 12 12x/8x/32x
Generic FD 3.5"
Generic FD 5.25"
EnerMax 350W PSU powering mobo and HDs
Codegen 350W PSU powering CDROMs FDs and fans.
Codegen BigTower.
Watercooling and 13 fans.

Problems:
Problems with soundcard and IRQ conflicts with onboard components and strange driver/bootup problems.
Cure: disabling SB16 emulation for DOS inside the Hardware Profile and removing it form the autoexec.bat, and disabling one COM-port (COM 2).
Problem: RAID 0 array slow.
Cure: known problem with Seagate Barracuda IV, contacted Seagate for special RAID 0 optimized drives
Porblem: Artifacts with GeForce4 Ti4200.
Cure: setting AGP Driving Strength the DC or DE solved the problem.
Problem: Winamp 2.7x, 2.8x crashing sometimes in Win2k when changing song
Cure: Getting latest Winamp version and installing unofficial Via Latency Patch 0.19.

OSs: Windows 98, Windows 2000.

OC:
GeForce2 MX from 175/166 MHz to 225/205 MHz by adding a fan to the passive cooler
GeForce4 Ti4200 from 250/444 MHz to 285/570 MHz with RAMsinks and watercooling for the GPU... going to try even higher speeds.
Athlon XP1600+ @ XP2000+ speed with multiplier raising after unlocking it... also needed to do voltage mod to get the VCore around 2.0V... will try FSB overclocking later.

I can tell more about other systems I build and about my watercooling building if you want.

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P4 2.4B; Philippines; 1.5V; ~30C idle, Stock Intel HSF
ASUS P4B533; 845E; 6 Channel C-Media; 24C idle
512MB Samsung PC2700 "DTL" @ DDR266 (gotta try the jumper trcik to get DDR354)
80GB Western Digital "800JB"
Antec PLUS1060 case w/ 330 TruePower PSU; 3 80mm case fans
MSI GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB; Stock; 30.82, 40.71 when testing 3D Mark
LG 32x10x40 CD-RW
Sony 16X DVD-ROM
Logitech Internet Keyboard
Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical
Dell P991 19" Trinitron
Some 3.5" Floppy

OS: WinXP Pro & Win2000 Pro Dual boot

Probs: Network only works sometimes between this comp and a Dell P4 1.4GHz which is also running WinXP Pro. When running Win2000, I can't get the network to work at all. If anyone can help, it'd be greatly appreciated.

OCing: Got the CPU to 2.84GHz at 1.6V and ~34C idle, 38C after running 3D Mark. Gonna try for more when I have time.

Ti4200 ran up to 300/540 so far. Still haven't tried more. Getting ~12K 3D Marks.

RAM is okay so far, even though it's DTL. Got it to DDR316 ~ 2.7V and 2-2-5-2T. I'll try to get the jumper trick done and see if I can't get near DDR400.

...And all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put my computer back together again...

Ok well Ryan you told me to post here and so I will......

I posted this already in the CPU Section....but here it goes again by your request......check out my site for all the detials by clicking <A HREF="http://209.161.201.77/MyComputer.htm" target="_new">HERE</A>

And as for problems......in all honesty i Have yet to find or have a single problem with that system mentioned....the only TOUGH thing about anything at all was to unlock the CPU....i DID successfuly do it...but it was very time consuming to connect the L1 bridges........Well Thats all...oh..ive never had a software conflict, a hardware conflict or anything of the sort on this system........it doesnt crash.....nothing....

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=13597" target="_new">-MeTaL RoCkEr</A>

my main rig:
enermax case
enermax 431 watt psu
soyo dragon + mother board w/ onboard lan and c media sound
athlon xp 1700 oc 2000, no voltage change
swiftech mcx 01
384 megs crucial ddr 2100
geforce 1 w/ pentium 1 hsf (stock fan broke)
pinnacle capture card
adaptec 2940 au scsi
adaptec 19160 uw scsi
ibm 40 somthing gig (7200 rpm)
maxtor 40 somthing gig (7200 rpm)
plextor 40x cd rom (scsi)
plextor 24x burner
nec dvd rom
5 9.1 gig 15k rpm scsi hard drives in hot swap case
5 4.3 gig 15k rpm scsi hard drives in hot swap case
5 1.2 gig ide hard drives (not really in use, just there when i want to play with raid)
2 generic 80 mm case fans
1 120 mm 90 cfm fan (blow hole at the top)
1 case mod im working on now, side window and clear top scsi hard drive. yes the hard drive still works thank you!
microsoft natural kb
ms explorer optical mouse
viewsonic a70 17 inch crt
thrust master steering wheel with peddals.
os's - 98 for the ocasional incompatibility with xp, xp for my main use, 2000 server for experiments (mcse study)

cant say i have had any real problems, an occasional game crash. it doesnt happen often enough for me to try and trace the problem down.

how do you shoot the devil in the back? what happens if you miss? -verbal

With everything you've replaced you've definitely Rebuilt it. Ryan





Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.

Sounds like a sweet machine with your window mods and all, what are your FSB settings to achieve the OClocking you're at? Ryan




Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.

157mhz fsb

Life (n). A sexually transmitted disease which afflicts some people more severly than others.
save family guy via this link!
<A HREF="http://www.petitiononline.com/savefg2" target="_new">http://www.petitiononline.com/savefg2</A>

i used translucent blue plastic, it only cost about 3.50, including the cost for them to cut it to size and round the edges.

how do you shoot the devil in the back? what happens if you miss? -verbal

PIII 1000EB
Generic power supply
Soyo SY-BA6+III
Lucent 1646T00 modem
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card
Maxtor 7200RPM 20GB IDE hard drive
Sony 8x/4x/32x SCSI CDRW
Panasonic 16x DVD-ROM
Aureal Vortex2 SQ2500 soundcard
Radeon (original version) LE DDR video card modified to retail spec
SCSI ZIP100
Quantum 2GB SCSI hard drive
Seagate 2GB SCSI hard drive
Floppy
256MB Crucial Cas2 PC133
Abit Slotket!!! slot adapter
Panaflow case fan
Intel retail cooler
Palo Alto plastic case (Micron Client Pro 766XE model)

No problems whatsever. Tried XP, 2k, 98SE. 100% stable under 98SE. Tried another board (Abit SA6R) which was garbage (stability problems) and switched back, this one performed better anyway.

Every week or two I add a new program that requires a reboot, other than that I never have to reboot.

Oh, a LONG time ago this board did blow it's main capacitors, I replaced them with oversized units myself because Soyo refused to honor the warranty on a 2 month old board. I consider this a defect, not a stability issue.

BTW, I'm a technician, the BX chipset is the only one I know of to have zero compatability issues.


<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>

OK, now you asked for it, I'm not going to hold back. (Poster isn't responsible for damage done by this large post).

I first ran Win98 on this system quite stable, but switched to Win2k last Summer... much better I must say.
The normal Barracuda IV in RAID 0 will performe even lower then a single ATA100 disk in both HDTach, PCMark2002 as Sandra 2002 SP1... I contacted Seagate support by mail and asked them for replacement drives after reading an article about special RAID 0 version drives on another forum. They sent me 2 RAID 0 so I was able to copy my entire array to those new drives and after that I sent the old ones back to Seagate... only the shipping to Seagate Holland was for my costs. They perform 3x times better then the old ones.
I'm currently waiting of 2 new drives from Seagate (again, this time 40GB because they don't have 20GB anymore) because one of my RAID 0 drives seem to have to warm up for 5-10 minutes before the onboard RAID controller BIOS finds them; this is a HD problem and not caused by cables or the controller. That is the main reason I don't OC the FSB: I don't want to stress my HDs

Now something about my watercooling and casemods.
I modded my case so it could hold my second PSU by making a hole in the back above the normal PSU hole. I also made a blowhole at the top and left side for 80mm fans and one in the bottom for a 92mm fan. All my (6) casefans are controlled by a DigiDoc5 with temp sensors... I also placed 6 LEDs in the front of my case so I can see which fans are running with one look at the case.
I used one of my 3.5" bays to mount 2 buttons so I can power on/off the HD fans (2) and a PCI fan... the third button controls the LEDs that can be used to light the CDROMs from the side so you can find them in the dark. I also painted my case darblue and the CDROMs black.

I'm using a Swiftech MCW-462B to cool my CPU, I manaully made some small holes in the baseplate which at the site that contacts the watter to increase surface.
For the cooling of my GPU and NB I use Koolance GPU and NB alu coolblocks.
As radiator I use the HWLabs BlackIce 1 and a homemade 3-pass radiator made my a Coolermaster AMD heatsink (alu) and some copper pipes. The fan is a Delta HP120mm fan slowed down with resistors and a rheostat.
As resevoir I use an old soup kettle (yes, really) from aluminium with a Sicce Hydra 1300l/h pump.
Because my case is already filled up with hardware I have my radiator and pump/resevoir standing next to my case inside a K'Nex tower.
I plan to do some revision on my watercooling setup to make the tubes between my case and K'Nex tower removable without spilling water to make my rig more portable.
I also want to change the in/out lets of the Swiftech waterblock to increase waterflow.

You can find pics of my rig here:
<A HREF="http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~svo/rig" target="_new">http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~svo/rig</A>

My previous mobo was an ASUS A7V133 and I had similair SB Live! problems with it, which only could be solved by placing the soundcard in PCI slot 3 and, ofcourse, by disabling the SB16 emulation.

I build another system for my brother with parts of my first PC:
Intel Pentium 3 450MHz Slot1
ASUS P2B-F Intel 440BX chipset
2*128 MB SDRAM (CAS 3, 100 and 133MHz)
Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 32MB card
Soundblaster PCI128
Samsun 10GB HD
Activa 50x CROM
Generic 3.5" FD
Sitecom Realtek 10/100Mb/s NIC

This system did cause any problems and is running very stable. My brother doesn't want me to OC it .

I also build a small gateway server:
Intel Pentium 75@90 MHz CPU
Intel Advanced ZP mobo
80MB Fastpage/EDO RAM (mixed)
2 GB Quantum HD
2*Sitecom Realtek 10/100Mb/s NICs
SiS 4MB 6349 (or something) PCI videocard
ISA I/O card.
Mini AT tower
16x CDROM
3.5" Generic FD
5.25" Generic FD

This system also runs pretty good, the only problems I got where:
Problem: onboard COM ports not functioning.
Cure: the seem to be broken so I bought a cheap I/O card to give me some new ones.
Problem: CDROM wont read
Cure: the head of the laser seemed to be stuck, after opening it and freeing the head it worked again... but often locks so I have to unlock it again.

That's all for now.

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ok have built 3 systems , a pentium 2, a p-3 and a p-4 I will only describe the p-4 as the others arent that relevant at this time (except the p-3 overclocking glitch on the asus cusl2-c board.. the memory bus won't overclock past 144mhz unless you run stuffpcr an after market freeware that overcomes this problem)

p-4 2.0a northwood retail cpu, HSF
Soyo p4s ultra motherboard sis 645 chipset
2 sticks 256 mb Kingmax tiny bga pc 2700 ram @ 333mhz
onboard sis lan\nic operational and works fine
c-media onboard sound disabled
hi-point raid ( will get back to this)
Turtle beach Santa Cruz OEM no problems
geforce3 ti-200 later replaced by a ATI radeon retail 8500 w\ 3.3bga ram 64 mb
Enermax PSU 400 watt
2 maxtor 40 gb ata 133 HDD's
Asus 52x cd rom
Lite-on 32123s burner overclocked to 40125s XSU1 firmware
currentlyb usiong bios version 2aa3 as an attempted bios upgrade trashed the system somehow ( had to f-disk and reformat drivesand prompted me to remove my raid 0 array and switch back to the primary ide controllers
The soyo board will not overclock for sh*t, and unless you send this model in for some cobbled together soldered on resistor change it will not work with a geforce 4 card .. any of them ...

<font color=red><b> It may be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others</font color=red></b>

Probably, SiS's non-integrated chipsets have been top notch for over a year now.

<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>

Gigabyte Ga-7vaxp (yuck...but it's a replacement till I get my Soyo Sy-kt333 back)
Athlon XP 1800+ Agoga stepping
256mb Crucial Pc-266 Ddr sdram Cl 2.0 forced
Nvidia Geforce2 Pro (when they used to make the cards!)
Integrated Alc 650 5.1 sound
LG 8x4x32 Cd-rw
Asus 16x Dvd-rom
Microsoft Optical Intellimouse
Basic keyboard
Altec Lansing 251 5.1 speakers
Chieftec Medium tower dragon case (black)
Antec 430 watt truepower
3x Coolermaster 80mm case fans
1x Antec blue led fan...only one of the leds works ;(
Thermalright Ax7 heatsink
1x Coolermaster 80mm case fan on the heatsink
2x Xoxide Cold Cathodes, 1 blue, 1 red
all the pirated software from microsoft you could dream of =O

Once I save up some money, i'm making a few upgrades...probably looking for a used Geforce3, and a sound card...heck, even a cheapie Sound Blaster Live value...could use a little more ram for my windows 2k. Other than that, i'm very happy with my system

Soon enough, Intel will make the i845s...imagine dual channel Sdram...*shudder*

Interesting about the USB M/B connection, it seems like, the M/B manufacturers could have adopted some standard of connectors, on these additional attachments, like the USB issue, instead of each one being different. They've adopted common ground on other connectors like PCI, AGP, IDE, Floppy, so why not have a solid standard for the USB, and other types of accessories, so you could pick one up locally if you needed one, instead of having to order the exact one you need from the M/B manufacturer. Ryan





Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.

What Seagate did for you is definitely a feather in their cap, its hard to find a company that will work with you like that. Impressive rig you have, you definitely invested some serious time in its developement. What kind of connector set did you use to construct your cooling tower out of, I've never seen anything like that?Ryan





Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.

Bet it really looks cool, got any pictures of it, you can post? Ryan




Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.

LOL, I ordered the parts, the parts were on backorder, I had to cancel the order. I received an $800 educational grant to cover "education related outside expenses", and the money has been sitting for several months now. In fact it's been sitting long enough that I can probably get another grant as soon as I spend the first one. Now I'm hearing that the SiS 655 really is supposed to be released, held back because SiS needs production room to fill current 648 orders...could be interesting to see what happens. Also the Radeon 9700 is so large a leap over other graphics cards, it would be nice to wait a few weeks for the first price drop...which I expect in around 5-8 weeks.

<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>

Well, I was installing my new Ax7 heatsink for the first time, and I never installed one of those stupid 3-prong clip designs. Poor design, but a good clip. I applied too much force using my flathead screwdriver, and slipped, crushing a resistor on the motherboard. It damaged the 3 phase power regulation, and that pretty much [-peep-] up the board

Soon enough, Intel will make the i845s...imagine dual channel Sdram...*shudder*

Wow... a HD mod. HowTF did you do that without destroying the disk?

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its not hard at all. just take out some screws, cut the seal around the edges, then there is a screw that attatches to the spindle and the head arm. i was concerned about what to do about them, so i just took them out. it works just fine without them. i dont think they are there for further reinforcment of the moving parts, probly just to keep the top cover from fluttering. the screw on the head arm was too small for any tools i had, you need a hex or torx head the size of .07 lead. so i just drilled the screw head out. as soon as i got the top plate off i put the drive into a plastic bag, making sure never to touch the platter. i used the four screws at the corners as standoffs so the new cover wouldnt touch anything inside. then i glued the plastic to the screws and carefully squeezed some industrial strength silicon into the 1/8 inch gap. it works just fine. i have a couple more hard drives just like the one i modded, so the next step is to put leds inside the hard drive, there is plenty of room. i think when i get done with the rest of my school, im going to go nuts and do some serious case modding. im looking through the cyber guys magazine, there are some awsome things in there. im gonna get a couple of fans that have clear blades and leds that light up the blades.

how do you shoot the devil in the back? what happens if you miss? -verbal

But a little piece of dust could destroy the drive right? Or is that what the HD makers tell us to keep us out of the drives?

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over the years of working on computers, i have found that computers are not nearly as fragile as people make them out to be. oh, one tip about modding a hard drive, if you value silence, dont mod with thin plastic. the mettal cover is a far better sound insulator than a piece of plastic.

how do you shoot the devil in the back? what happens if you miss? -verbal

its a 2 gig two platter scsi drive. its pretty old, 4 years or so.

how do you shoot the devil in the back? what happens if you miss? -verbal

Looking forward to the Pics. Ryan





Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.

Another forum I frequent allowed us to post our system specs. This works out really well because when someone in that forum gives you advice you can check out his system to see if he's speeking from experience or not. It also allows newbies to see what drivers we are using. I use my spec page as a clickable link in all forums to save me from re-typing it each time. It works out well. Maybe we could all include a link to our systems in our sigs.

The Men Behind the GUNS!

<A HREF="http://www.btvillarin.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=327" target="_new"><b>MY SYSTEM</b></A><P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by rubberbband on 10/21/02 10:59 PM.</EM></FONT></P>