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 :)