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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (3972)	12/8/1998 12:06:00 AM
From: Roman S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

To All: I've lurked this thread for a while and decided since alot of people love to tell what they've got, now it's my turn. Building and upgrading my PC's has become a fun hobby. I built my first in April and then built a second 2 months later. Before I started serious trading, I was still using my old 486sx Tandy that I bought back in '92. My first custom build was a pr200 Cyrix on a MTechnology 549 board, 1/2M onboard cache, with 96Meg EDO memory and a 4.3HD. I chose a CTX 17" monitor, and initially had a 28.8 modem, but quickly went to 56k. I was happy but had the urge to build another one, because I wasn't getting the throughput required to enter orders fast enough while watching RTIII. There was just too much delay. I figured 2 computers running 56k modems would solve my problem. Purchased another CTX monitor, MTechnology 581 board with 1Meg cache, 64Meg SDramm, used my older 1.3G HD from the 486, and the Cyrix MII 300 chip. Trading was faster this way, as one was used for RTIII and order entry or research on the other, but the need for more speed still existed for order entry. It was taking about 20-30 seconds for me to hit the submit button on my orders. Then I finally decided ISDN has to be the way. I wanted to upgrade the PR200 chip to the Amdk350 and maybe a little more memory, but was informed that my motherboards didn't have a 100Mhz bus. Then I had to start cooking ideas right there in the store, because it's a good 30 minute drive. I choose the Soyo 5ehm board with 1meg cache, 256M pc100 memory, and the Amdk350 chip. Also ordered a 6.4g HD (and I've always bought Western Digital, no problems here.) When I installed the board and loaded Win95, I also was told in the manual to add some IRQ mapping driver and some driver to take advantage of ETEQ chipset (????) and the machine would lock up on me and also give a "Windows protection" error. At this point was getting very frustrated and talked to a friend of mine who said NT should be more stable. Went ahead with it and it's the best move I ever did. Data flies in like I've never seen and my orders get in within 10 seconds. And I have the k350 linked with network cards to the MII-300, just in case I need something off one computer to put on the other. Configuring NT was a bitch, but finally got it working like a clock. Sorry for being long winded on a first post, but it'll maybe give some ideas to those out there things to consider when building that custom PC. Task manager shows CPU usage on the 350 to usually be around 4 or 6% when running RTIII and two browser windows. Only using about 80 meg of ram while running these. I guess I'm up to date, but they just came out with the AMD 400 and I bought a Tyan 1570 when I thought the Soyo board was going back to the store. Maybe I can use one of the 128 pc100 chips, the Tyan, and got a mid tower case real cheap online, have a second ISDN modem in transit (was going to be just in case one computer goes down), ..........God, my wife is going to kill me !!!!!! Have a nice night all....