[Slithy_Tove]

Originally posted by jaguar
ASUS MOTHERBOARD ON A 266BUS????
WHY GOD WHY???
I"ve had 6 of these machines in my hands myself - problems with 5 of those baords, the Asus 266DDR bus board are fucking awful, get somthing with the SIS735 shipset!!!!

You know, this is the first time I've ever heard anyone criticize the Asus's quality. People criticize them for being expensive, or only having two DIMM slots, or being a hair behind in the benchmarks from current mb's, but everyone seems to respect their stability and quality.

Get the biggest cooler you can - i've got a 1.2 with a ALPHA PAP on it, still @ 50 most of the time. Remember to clean that cooler out regualry, dust builds up and adds temp so fast its not funny. Swifttech make some huge heatsinks(700g!!) that you could get away with running with quieter fans and still get damn good peformance.

My problem with a heatsink that size is the strain on the socket and MB, especially in the usual tower case with the whole thing mounted sideways.

If you have some spare drive bays, put fan slots in them, put a fan card after your graphics if you have the space and one fan in the space thats usually on the back next ot the CPU.

Good thoughts. I'll probably do this.

IBM drives, yea i have heard of some problems but overall IBM make the best harddrives on the market, Quantum are reliable but not the fastest, segate are pretty good and i wouldn't touch a Western Digital with a 30ft pole.

Yep, I've heard a lot of problems with WD drives as well. I notice Fujitsu just dropped out of the HD market. Too bad, their drives were respected.

Ifyou plan to copy CDs drive to drive you need to put one of those on the other bus, internal bus transfer on IDE are shocking .

But then where will my 20 gig swap drive go? If I put it on the same IDE as one of the CD/DVD's, won't it be limited in data transfer speed to the speed of the slowest device on that IDE, i.e., the CD drive?

Thanks for the lengthy feedback!