And you didn't even notice i had gone !

[paulselhi]

Well some of you may have heard about the demise of my AMD K6 500 Mhz box the other week, i had to use my sons for a while and then i took a break from the net to catch some rays ( god i love this cool yanke talk- man :cool: )

well guy's and girls, i built a new box and wow am i happy, just can't get over the guilty feeling when i look at my old K6-2 lying in a cupboard with it's guts wrenched out

As the K6-2 was an AMD 500 Mhz CPU i was not that desperate to get a very expensive XP 3200 or a P4 so i went for an AMD 2000 XP at 1.67 GHz the upgrade is quite large and i got one very cheap ( well by UK prices i suppose US prices are much cheaper) here is the list, all from watford electronics ( shop in luton )


AMD Athlon XP2000+ 1.67 GHz £45
inc heatsink/fan

KT3-V Sck A Via KT333 DDR ATX Motherboard ( MSI6712 ) £36

I was initially looking at MATX since the old case was this format but as i needed a new 300W PS i decided to buy a larger case inc PS. Got one for £22

This board has all i need for the price, 6 PCI slots, support for 200/266/333 MHz FSB, and an agp 4x slot and a CNR ( oohh !!!)

It comes with an onboard Realtek ALC650 6 channel audio
Supports DDR200/266/333 RAM so i decided to go for 256 MB PC2700 DDR RAM 333 MHz at £ 16.95

A geoforce 4 MX440-Se 64 MB AGP TV out Graphics adapter at £30

OK so none of this is top of the range but it's exapndable, the MB can take 3 ram modules up to 3 GB, plenty of bays and PCI, blue tooth connector for wireless

So total outlay £149.95 = £176.25 inc vat

The MB also sports a good comprehensive monitoring sytem and provides software for adjusting cpu temp thresholds voltage thresholds etc. It also has a utility called cooler XP that can bring the cpu core temp down by 10 degrees with not drastic loss in performance

Installationis sweet, just need to get to know the various connections that come from the case, as i could not get to much info from the old system i had to put my thinking cap on ( hey this is my first build !!) Total from box open to boot about 3 hours, with maybe an hour of that checking the manual, and most of the time fiddling with the heat sink clips

well if anyone else has this MB please let me know what sort of temps you are seeing and what configuration you have in the bios

Oh yes, this is an overclockers board, comes with a cool s/w user interface to do just that. But not for me.... 1.6 GHz is fine enough

by the way try £1 = $1.6 for a rough exchange rate

[paulselhi]

Well here's something useful i learnt whilst building this box :

If you make it idiot proof, someone will design a better idiot

[(jj)]

Originally posted by paulselhi
Well here's something useful i learnt whilst building this box :
If you make it idiot proof, someone will design a better idiot


Ok, what did you break Paul??? :D

[paulselhi]

haven't quite worked that out yet, the pc just froze on a heavy video conversion, then an awful smell of TCP ( the antiseptic) and then it went dead, no boot- not even to bios

well the PS is still turning it's fan but the fan on the heatsink is not working

this mb did not have heat sensors ( that i can see) and i think it just overheated but there is no obvious sign of damage on the cpu or MB

I tried a different PS ans still no good, maybe there is some overheat shutdown and it was just the cpu fan that was melting but then that would kill the cpu

since it was an old k6-2 amd 500 MHz i am not to concerened aboout a repair as the upgrade was worth the extra money so i suppose as my old man would say " one door closes on you and two open up "

[paulselhi]

in respect to the idiot proof, i spent about 20 mins puzzling over why the new box would not fire up then realised i had connected the cables from the on/off switch to the wrong terminals, you need microscopic vision to read the labelling on these motherboards !!

[(jj)]

Originally posted by paulselhi
in respect to the idiot proof, i spent about 20 mins puzzling over why the new box would not fire up then realised i had connected the cables from the on/off switch to the wrong terminals, you need microscopic vision to read the labelling on these motherboards !!

If they make the print on these new boards any smaller, I'll need a microscope to read it. As it is now, I use one of those magnifier lights when I'm putting together a system. Even with that, sometimes it's hard to tell what some pins are labeled.

Sounds like you've got a nice system now, speed and decent graphics power to boot :)

[Croc Hunter]

Originally posted by paulselhi
AMD 2000 XP at 1.67 GHz [snip] well if anyone else has this MB please let me know what sort of temps you are seeing and what configuration you have in the bios

AMD Athlon 1.67Ghz
Asus A7S333

CPU temp 56C/132F threshold set at 80C
MB.. temp 36C/96F.. threshold set at 60C
VCore...... 1.776...... threshold set at 10%

Thats on idle.. When I have NOF, Blender/Maya, Photoshop etc. running she creeps up around 64C Asus Probe 2 is a little ripper mate. My biggest fear is a meltdown, I autoexec Asus Probe in summer here when it's 40C/110F + in the shade occasionally.

[paulselhi]

Hi Croc,

there is a themostat running from bios on the msi board but i am not sure if it's ability to shutdown is limited to boot or if it monitors all the time. There is a program that comes with the board that monitors the temp during windows and i have set this to cut out at 70 c. Now AMD rate these cpu's up to 90C but i think if it's running at anywhere near this something must be drastically wrong

i had not thought about the VCORE mine is running at around 1.6 Vand i can set the min max, where di you get the threshold fighure of 10 % from ?

F**K me , now this IS getting nerdy :D

[satis]

holy crap, your CPU is running at 132 degrees? That's a tad high. You may want to look into getting a better cooling solution. Granted, it's not in dangerous areas (when I first got my 1.2, it was running at about 150), but it's still high. I used some arctic silver and a nice cooler and I'm running around 110 now. Sorry, I don't know the celsius. Being in the US makes the whole metric thing kinda useless to me.

I've got some overclocking friends who groan at my 110. Well, I'm happy, and my system is happy, so that's all that matters, right?

For the record, I'm running a 1.2ghz athlon on an Abit KT7A-RAID motherboard.

[paulselhi]

Abit KT7A-RAID

Damm, Satis you mentioned the "R" word - now my toilet is blocked :(

[satis]

eh? You intimidated by RAID? :P RAID is cool...I'm not sure I'll ever build another computer (for myself, at least) that doesn't have RAID. I'm thinking for my next one I'll buy a RAID-5 SATA board. Fault tolerance is an awesome thing in this world of failing hard drives. Oh, and a UPS is a must as well. :)

[paulselhi]

I once spent an evening drinking with a detective sergant from the serious crime squad, during his youth, whilst still a lowly constable he was active on the infamous "Mars Bar " raid.

Briefly this was a drugs bust on one of Mick Jaggers parties during the 1960's or 70's in which Mr J was supposidly caught licking a chocalte Mars bar which was situated in an extremeley lewd part of Marienne Faithuls, anatomy :o

Sadly the copper in question was not in the building but was stationed outside. He had me creasing up when he described how the occupants of the "abode" were throwing their drugs out of the window whilst he and several other officers were throwing the gear back in :p

[Croc Hunter]

where di you get the threshold fighure of 10 % from ?
paulselhi
It was the default value so I left it at that. In my apprenticeship an elec inspector once told me "If you exceed a lightbulbs rated voltage by 5% it will halve it's life."

holy crap, your CPU is running at 132 degrees? That's a tad high.
satis
That's high ? :/ I'll get my new hacksaw blade out. hehe. ;)

[satis]

Paul: heh... you come up with some stuff out of left field. :) Poor Mick. A Mars bar, though? *shudder* Well, to each their own, I guess. Musta had a chocolate craving or something. heh.

Croc... heh...a hacksaw? :) You may not wanna go quite that far. heh...that reminds me of a story I heard once. I hope it wasn't on here, cuz I'll feel dumb, but anyway... supposedly these people got an expansion card of some sort (video card, sound card, modem, I forget), but the damned thing was so long it wouldn't fit in this person's case. So they called tech support. Tech support told them to take a hacksaw to it (very specific where) and basically lop off the last couple of inches. They did it, and everything worked great. Apparently the last area was either redundant or just there for looks. :)