[plug] HW suggestions?

[Bernd Felsche]

On Tuesday 23 March 2004 21:04, Garry wrote:
> I know this is off track, so I ask the list's indulgence..
>
> Due to a full hdd and a suspected cooked Athlon 800, I lashed out
> and bought a 120Gig hdd and a Duron 1600 CPU, and a TV card to
> boot. Thought I'd update the old girl. Silly enthusiasm in
> hindsight.

> Unfortunately my current A7V m/b doesn't seem to want to play with
> any of them.. It does work fine with the Athlon 800, infuriatingly
> reliable - as it was configured before. I thought it was semi dead
> (soon to die) for sure after getting to 117C.

> So to use these "bits" I'll build a TV box.

> Naturally I don't want to be buying any more poor choices.. Or waste
> money on what is really a fairly modest PC!

> Would PLUGgers have any good suggestions from recent experience?
> Current m/b is about 4 years old.
> New case with a 400W+ supply, a socket A m/b and RAM is what I'll need..
> Built in LAN is good if it is a common chipset, about 4 PCI slots
> + AGP port... Lowish cost is good..

Probably 300W would be plenty.

ASUS A7N8X-VM is a uATX mainboard with all the fruit you need... add
an AGP card if the onboard isn't to your liking. uATX means you can
build a smaller system. Just built 3 systems based on that recently.
2 desktop systems and a firewall/proxy/DHCP/fileserver/...

Remember; smaller cases cost more than big ones! 

If small size doesn't matter, then a GigaByte GA-7N400PRO2 costs
about the same, but without the video... NForce2 chipset works quite
well with Linux. The GA-7N400Pro2 has an ITE RAID controller taht
you can use to stripe data across two drives... Linux drivers
available but SuSE 8.2 didn't have them built in... no great shakes;
supported by the chip-maker. There's also a Serial ATA controller
with RAID so heaps of capacity and bandwidth for any sort of video.
You can save about $50 by getting a lower-spec GA-7N400-L.

EPoX 8RGMi looked good on spec and price, but getting one can be very
difficult. I gave up after 5 weeks.

Dual channel DDR is an advantage... but you need at least two sticks
to make it work; and on some boards, dual channel is disabled when
you use the onboard video.

Avoid anything with KM400 chipset. It can be made to work but it's a
lot of work. I've got a board with AMD XP2600 mounted as a reminder
not to buy another one.

Check the manufacturer's spec's to ensure that they'll cope with
the Duron... some may not because the Athlon has on-chip thermal
sensors, and IIRC, the Duron requires one under the socket on the
mainboard - unless you want to take another toaster challenge.

> Extreme cutting edge stuff (or a speccy feature list) isn't needed.. The
> TV card is the most work it'll do!

Some boards have Y-C video "onboard", but I've not found any Socket
A in Australia that bring it out to a connector. You might be better
served with a low-end AGP card with TV-out.

> Like I said, this is out of the normal. But ideas would be appreciated.

As for cases, Antec are my flavour of the month. Good value for
money with good airflow design in general and the later ones have
quiet mountings for hard drives and quiet power supplies. The
SLK-3700BQE are nice compact server cases that come with a single
120mm fan for cooling. You can add another 120mm fan at the front if
you're worried about your hard drives cooking.

Had some trouble getting the SLK-3700BQE in Perth, so used
SLK-3700AMB to build some servers instead. Theyr'e a bit older in
design, using 80mm fans. The PSU on them has a fan-only power socket
that reduces fan speeds when the PSU thinks it doesn't need the
extra airflow. The side-panel-mounted fan is the wrong way around;
it blows cooling air in near the back of the system, so your DVD
drive gets toasty warm. Doh! Easy fix.

If you want a smaller case, then a shiny, black Antec OVERTURE case
could make your other furniture look cheap. Heat shouldn't be an
issue with your CPU.... but keep some space around the TV Card.

-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
\ /  ASCII ribbon campaign | I'm a .signature virus!
 X   against HTML mail     | Copy me into your ~/.signature
/ \  and postings          | to help me spread!