Street Walker: Because of you and others on this great thread I just finished building my own computer this weekend and I'm no geek (vbg) by any stretch of the imagination. It has been a very frustrating, albeit very rewarding experience. My previous system was a P133 w/64MB of RAM and my new system is a Celeron 266 overclocked to 400 . . . and it screams when compared to my old system.
Background: I use my computer primarily for my work but also use it for personal and entertainment, read games, purposes. I found my old computer starting to get long in the tooth after it seemed so much faster than my old 386. I started out wanting a better video card after I loaded Pro Pinball and found it wouldn't run on my system. My knowledge of computers was minimal so I started reading a lot, beginning with this thread. I learned of the newer AGP cards and decided to order the new Matrox Mystique G200 since it seemed you got so much performance for the money, not realizing you had to plug it into a mobo w/AGP port. It was at this point I decided to build my own computer from the ground up.
After visiting a few of my local vendors, Best Buy and Fry's, I decided to buy most of my components over the net, or at least find places in my local area over the net, where the best prices were offered for the components I wanted.
Components and prices:
Abit BH6 mobo. $119.00
Celeron 266-Retail in box w/fan. $112.00 including tax, since I bought it in Ca., and freight. Should have waited longer. Five days later it was about $20 less.
64MB PC100 SDRAM non ECC, no EEPROM. $93.00. Lifetime warranty. Anecdotally I felt the longer the warranty the higher the quality but just guessing here. Very confusing trying to determine whether to ECC or not, EEPROM, etc.
Maxtor Diamond Max 5.7 GB HD $175.00 (One of few purchases at a store)
Matrox Millenium G200 OEM $118.00 Couldn't yet get the Mystique so went w/Millenium instead.
Monster Sound M80 $59.00 w/$20.00 rebate.
Enlight ATX mid-tower 250W PS, extra cooling fan. $65.00
Everything else I transferred over from my old computer.
Assembly was much easier than I envisioned-just plug everything in and turn it on-although I was much more cautious than it sounds and went very slowly. The Enlight case was a pleasure to work with. I love the slide in/out cages and drive mounts.
Three areas of frustration: Getting the HD properly set up,issues w/the BIOS recognizing my CD as a second master, and getting the BIOS to recognize my fax modem.
Before shutting down my old computer I used DiskClone to copy my old HD onto my new Maxtor HD. DiskClone supposedly formats the new HD but I discovered later this to not be the case. I forget the problem I was having but I called Maxtor technical support and they were extremely helpful in helping me get the new HD partitioned and formatted to where I could then use DiskClone to copy my old HD onto my new HD. Using DiskClone allowed me to copy over my entire 750 MB of data in just a few minutes.
I set up the CD with its own IDE port so it wouldn't interfere with the HD's performance and vice versa. I expected the mobo's BIOS to recognize this as such. When I turned on the computer and went into BIOS and used the default settings, as recommended, and asked it to recognize the CD it wouldn't do so-at least like it would the HD. I went through every combination imaginable but when I saved the configuration and booted up it always displayed a message that it couldn't recognize the second master drive. Funny because I could go ahead and boot up and use the CD anyway.
What was more confounding was Windows 98 not properly installing my U.S. Robotics 56K modem. It would see it and say it was properly working but when I tried to call out Windows would tell me the modem wasn't working, etc. I kept going into Device Manager and finally determined there were IRQ and COM port conflicts which I couldn't resolve by assigning new, unused, ones. I was at my wits end by now and well into Sunday when I decided to experiment with the BIOS. I disabled the USB ports on the mobo, since I wasn't using them anyway, and I disabled one of the two serial ports. I deduced the serial port was the one for the mouse which was right next to one not being used so I disable that one.
Well when I rebooted this time everything worked. The CD was recognized as the secondary master and the fax/modem was automatically assigned to the proper locations. I don't know exactly what I did to get it working but I wasn't complaining.
Once I got all my drivers installed and my peripherals working I started playing with overclocking the CPU. This turned out to be a breeze with the BH6. I took a chance ordering the Celeron knowing I may not get the one with the newer stepping that supposedly allowed easier and more stable overclocking,. I supposedly stood a much better chance of getting the newer stepping with the boxed version, hence I ordered the boxed. Sure enough I got the stepping 0 instead of stepping 1 and, sure enough, I couldn't get it to run at 400 MHz . . . that is until I turned up the voltage to 2.2 volts. I read one post on this thread referring to turning up the voltage to 2.3 volts and I did too and it worked but I thought less is more in this case so I tried it at 2.2 volts and it works great. I'm not too concerned about the heat. If it pukes...well I've only spent about $100 for a CPU that performs like one for hundreds more and the newer 300A seems to have even more potential while leaving it at 2.0 volts. I have not yet had even one lockup or any problem associated with running at this speed or voltage. When I run Forsaken at 800X600 with the highest texture mapping, etc. it says I'm at 76 FPS-not bad!
Sorry for the long post. I thought you might like to hear the experience of one who not too many years ago was scared to death to even turn on a computer much less build one.
halfscot |
