A Computer for 2002
Jan 15 '02 (Updated Mar 19 '02)
The Bottom Line Don't start this project unless you can consider it a "Labor of Love". This is a fantastic computer learning experience.
I originally published an Epinion article in August 2001 describing a state of the art system I built then. Many changes have taken place, so I’ve built on that earlier article to relate mistakes I made and to describe what I would put together if I was building in March 2002.
Where to Buy
I bought my case and almost everything in it except DDR Dram from www.NewEgg.com. NewEgg had virtually the lowest price on everything, and I saved a lot of money on shipping buying mainly from one source. Everything I ordered from them was as described, and I found their site easy to navigate and I appreciated the pictures of items, links to manufacturers’ sites, and customer comments on most items. Don’t expect any technical support from them, but decent technical support is available from most manufacturers by phone and via their web page.
When buying parts, start at www.pricewatch.com to link to various vendors’ sites. Be sure to check the rating and comments about each vendor you are considering at www.resellerratings.com, http://techbargains.pricegrabber.com/rating_summary.php/ or www.bizrate.com.
Update NewEgg would still be my first choice. They have dropped their price on just about everything, and are virtually the lowest priced seller on the net. Their service is as fast and reliable as ever.
Now my system:
CPU: AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz. Thunderbird with 266 Mhz FSB. This was the fastest horse in the stable, in August 2001. This is a big decision since the motherboard and RAM are built around the CPU. I was initially strongly inclined to go with Intel rather than AMD, but almost everything I read told me that I would get a lot more bang for my buck with the Athlon. I bought the retail box, which included thermal paste, heatsink and fan, which seem to be doing a decent job of keeping my CPU cool and my system has been solid. I doubt if you will notice much difference in the performance of your system as the result of any good AMD CPU you get. I've overclocked mine to 1.575, and underclocked it to 975, using Gigabyte's EasytuneIII software. I could not tell the difference, except when running benchmark tests. I think CPU speed rating is partly an advertising gimmick anyway. Even with a "cutting edge" system, the speed is still constrained by the transfer of data somewhere, probably everywhere, outside of the CPU.
Update My choice today would be the AMD 1.53Ghz (1800+). As of this writing they have come out with the 1900+ and the 2000+, each maybe 5% or so faster than the next slower model, but you will be paying a big premium for a little extra speed. Stepping back to the 1800+ will give you speed close to the Intel 2000, at a much better price. Again the retail box is worth buying if only to get the three-year warranty. I removed the stickum from the heatsink and replaced it with Arctic Silver 2 and found I ran a couple degrees C cooler. If you want to get extra cooling then check the forums at www.amdmb.com, and see what they are saying about different heat-sink fan combos. The Alpha PAL8045 is an example of one that is highly rated, but it is large, and requires a little modification to fit some boards (like my Gigabyte).
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-7DXR. The R is for RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent) Drives. Don’t let this concept scare you, it just means, if you use this feature, data will simultaneously be written to and read from two hard drives in the system. All of the real setup work is done in the BIOS software, and the documentation telling you what you need to know is excellent. For speed, I chose RAID 0, which means that data is striped (spread) across the two hard drives which are accessed at the same time. This makes for faster reads and writes. RAID 0 could more accurately be called "AID" since there is actually no redundancy. My system “sees” my two 40 Gig hard drives as one 80 Gig drive. This motherboard also has a 266 Mhz bus and only accepts DDR DRAM memory, which is faster than SDRAM, and is the direction RAM seems to be going. This MB has 4 USB ports, 3 DDR DIMM slots, and 5 PCI slots, and on-board sound. Gigabyte also includes software that allows you to overclock the CPU up to 1.575 Ghz. Gigabyte is a conservative choice for a motherboard, since the chipset is made by AMD. I've used these at work with no problems and they have a reputation of being very solid. There are a number of good motherboards with different features, just be sure you get a Socket A 266 Mhz bus to support the AMD chip and DDR DRAM. An article I read recently in MaximumPC Magazine indicates that the performance gain (read-writes) from a RAID is no more than 20%. This is still a significant gain for the price of an extra drive. My Soft Sandra benchmarks indicate a better performance gain than this (46%), but I am no expert. Remember to use a separate Ultra 100 RAID channel (a separate cable) for each of the raid drives, or your performance will be degraded. If the RAID scares you, then just go with a single good quality 7200 hard drive such as an IBM or Maxtor (see below). The RAID board does not cost much more, and you will have the option of RAID in the future, or at least extra IDE channels.
Update Today I would buy the Soyo K7V Dragon +. This is faster, being based on the KT266A chipset, and includes onboard RAID, sound, and network card and USB support. If I could put off building for a few months, I would keep my eye on boards also incorporating Nvidia graphics. I would hesitate to buy a board that had not been on the market for at least 2 or 3 months, since this is how long it seems to take to work out the bugs. The built in chips are not as high quality as you could get buying separate sound, network, etc. cards, but you remove the opportunity for a conflict, and the quality is adequate for most users. If you are not happy, you can always still buy a card. I still think the Gigabyte is a good solid board, just a little behind now.
Memory: Two 256 sticks of unregistered DDR PC2100 184-pin DIMM, for a total of 512 MB. I later read that I should have bought registered memory, which is more expensive and slightly slower, if I wanted to use my third DIMM slot. I recommend buying this directly from the manufacturer, www.crucial.com. (Micron Technology). Crucial is a good source for excellent quality memory. Most manufacturers’ sites charge outrageous prices for their products, but Crucial is an exception. They have an excellent, almost foolproof, ordering system and a lifetime warranty.
Windows 2000 or Windows XP will make good use of the extra memory, and you have plenty of room to play with a RAM drive, but that’s a whole other article.
Update After dropping for a long time, the price of memory has more than doubled in recent weeks, but is still cheap in an historical context. I would still buy directly from Crucial, and would still get a minimum of 512 MB, but this time I would pay a little more and get the 512 on one stick. Kingston, Corsair, and Mushkin are also high quality brands. I wouldn't buy cheap no-name memory, because you might be buying yourself some major problems.
Hard Drives: Two 7200 RPM IBM 40 Gig Deskstar 60GXP. A pair of excellent hard drives for the RAID. The two drives should be identical, since the size and speed of your RAID hard drive will be equal to the speed of your slowest hard drive, and the size will be twice the size of the smallest hard drive. I don't know what issues you might run into with two different brands of hard drive, but I wouldn't want to experiment on my dime. The recommended IBMs are fast, quiet IDE drives. Note: If you buy OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) drive, the cheapest way to go, you will get no mounting hardware, not even screws. I bought two IDE ultra 100 mobile docks (be sure to get the removable drive tray and docking bay combo) with a built in cooling fan. They were $30 each at CompUSA and the steady green lights and blinking red lights look cool when your system accesses your RAID. Plus the fans give you a little more cooling for the drives (which can really warm up when you are hitting them hard) and airflow through your case.
Update I disconnected the fans on the mobile docks. I couldn’t stand the high-pitched sound.
Update on hard drives: I recently installed a third IBM 40 Gig Deskstar with Norton Ghost ($15) to backup my C: drive. I feel this gives me a better safety net than a RAID 1 system which would allow my system to continue to operated with no loss of data if one of my hard drives failed. Risk of data loss is increased with a RAID 0, since if one drive fails, everything is lost. I'm more likely to trash my system by loading bad programs, drivers or picking up a virus, and RAID 1 will just duplicate your mistake. I do weekly backups so if something goes wrong, I just restore my system to exactly how it was last week. This method has already saved my bacon once. The price of this drive has dropped to under $90. At least the "Inexpensive" part of RAID 0 is now accurate. Also check out the price of the IBM 60 and 80 Gig hard drives, since their price has been falling.
Case: Enlight Mid-tower with 300-watt power supply. I got this ‘cause it was only $50 at NewEgg. It is a lot of case for the money. I would definitely not get less than 300 watts. This case has clips that let you slide the items mounted in the 4 (most mid-towers only have 3) front panels in and out without screws. This case has one 82mm air intake fan, and I bought an additional 92mm fan (mounted with double-sided foam tape), and a fan that mounts in a PCI slot for exhaust. It is cheap insurance for $13.
Update My case is fine, but did not have adequate mounting for two or three hard drives. Above I discuss the $60 I paid for two docking stations to fit my 2 RAID drive in 5 ½” bays. I could have bought a better case and power supply for not much more than the over $110 ($50 + $60) I paid. I would have bought a stronger (350 - 400 Watt) power supply if I had it to do over again, just for insurance. With all I’ve got going on in my system (3 hard drives, DVD, CD-RW, 2 extra fans) I’ve had no problems. If I was building today, I would get the ANTEC tower SX840 with a 400 watt PS. I would buy two extra Sunon 80mm fans to insure ample air flow. ANTEC is a well known name in power supply, and this case is great to work with.
Update on power: I just bought an APC 650 UPS from Sam's for $140. I've heard stories of files or HDs being corrupted by both power spikes and outages. This unit also protects my system from problems from my telephone line.
CDRW and DVD: 16X10X40 Plextor Plexwriter. Excellent quality with BURN-proof technology. You can use the CDRW for backing up your files or your entire system. Even my OEM CDRW came with EZ CD Creator software. I recommend a separate DVD player, a Toshiba 16X. Some software will be coming out on DVD, and DVDs are cheap, will read almost any kind of CD, and will facilitate CD-to-CD copying. Running CDs on the DVD will also save wear and tear on your more expensive CDRW. Don’t forget to buy a 4-pin soundcard cable for at least one of these devices. If you buy a soundcard in a retail box you should get one of the cables.
Update Since my equipment was all OEM, I was without a soundcard cable. CompUSA wanted $25 for this little cable. I had to buy one from NewEgg for $2 plus $4 shipping. I certainly will go to CompUSA for all my future computer needs (NOT).
Video Card: VGA ATI Raedon VE 32 Meg Dual DVI/TV. Definitely not a gamers’ card, but a good value for well under $100. The Gforce3 is a better card, but is still too expensive, and will be cheaper if you decide to upgrade in the future. I splurged on a Dell 17” LCD digital flat panel monitor so DVI out was important to me. This card also has a standard CRT monitor connector.
Update A friend just built the updated system I've described using a Ledtech Geforce3 128 MB Ti200 card ($189) on the Soyo KV7 Dragon + motherboard, and he says it works great. He RMAed (sent back) a PNY Gforce3 64 MB Ti200, because his system kept crashing. Also the PNY card did not include DVD software that worked on his system, so he had to buy DVD decoder software for $30, and his system still crashed occasionally.
Sound Card: Sound Blaster Live! A fine card that will serve most users well, unless you are using this system in a home entertainment center or are an avid gamer. I might have gone with the Sound Blaster 5.1 Platinum, but all of my front panels were full. Many new boards have built in sound (I didn't notice the Gigabyte did until it was too late) so a card might be unnecessary.
Keyboard and Mouse: Logitech Cordless Freedom Navigator Keyboard and Mouse. It's so nice to lose those extra cords.
Monitor: Like I said, a Dell 17” LCD digital flat panel monitor. It is very nice, with .264 pitch. LCD is now close to as good picture quality as CRT, and is easier on your eyes (and maybe your body if you're afraid of radiation) if you spend hours in from of it. A CRT monitor would be a better choice for an avid gamer, since they have higher refresh rates, or if you were doing a lot of graphics work.
Update I bought my flat panel monitor for $770, a great price in 8/01/01. I saw it at Dell for $749 less 20% less a $25 coupon with free shipping in January 2002. I think this is made by Phillips. Be careful when buying a flat panel; some vendors won't let you return it unless it has at least 8 bad pixels. A bad pixel shows up as a dot that never changes color. For this kind of money, I feel one bad pixel is unacceptable. If you buy from Dell, you are protected by their 30 day unconditional return policy.
Printer and Scanner: HP 932c and Epson Perfection 1240U. They are both highly rated and inexpensive.
Operating System and Software: NOT Windows ME. I would go with Windows 2000 Pro or Windows XP, even Windows 98 SE before Windows ME. I’ve had good experience with Windows 2000 Pro and also XP. XP still has some minor bugs and lack of driver support. It will not support some older software and hardware. I like Microsoft Office Suite word-processing (Word) and spreadsheet (Excel) software. You can get OEM operating system and software at a reasonable price if you buy along with your hardware purchase, but OEM software usually comes with little or no documentation (manuals).
3 ½” Floppy drive: Teac 1.44MB 3.5 Inch Floppy Drive. Remember, the red power wire goes on pin #1, which is closest to the data cable. Putting this on backward could fry your drive. Also remember to connect your drive to the last connector, after the twist in the cable, with the red stripe closest to the power cable.
ATA Ultra 100 IDE Cable: I bought the round cable to promote airflow in my system. If you buy OEM CDRW and DVD, you will need two cables (one flat cable should come with your motherboard). The round cable looks neat.
Update on cables: I would stick with the flat Ultra 100 cables. The round ones are OK, but they are more fragile, and easy to break (I did it). The boot on the 40 pin connector does not attach to the connector (at least on the cable I bought) so you have 40 exposed individual wires.
Speakers: Altec Lansing ACS54 5 pieces Power Plus for Gamers speaker system. These deliver good sound for inexpensive speakers.
Network card: 3Com USB Network Ethernet Adapter 10/100 Mbps USB Ethernet Adapter 3C460B. Not necessary if you’re not connecting to a network, using cable Internet access, or if you buy a board with a build in network connection.
Modem: US Robotic 56K V.90 Data Fax Voice Modem. I just used my old external modem with this description since I’m going to a cable Internet connection. I personally prefer the external modem since there is no chance for a conflict in a PCI slot and you are moving a heat producer out of your case. The external modem costs about twice as much, though. This is the only component I am listing that I did not actually install in my system.
Putting it Together
For a step-by-step guide on putting together this system I referred to instructions (with pictures) from www.tomshardware.com. Look in Epinions or do a www.Google.com search to find good articles about this. You will get good documentation with the CPU, motherboard, and case. Be especially careful when connecting the little colored wires from the front of the case with little black connectors with labels like “HD LED” and “POWER” to the double row of about 16 or so pins on the motherboard. If you put everything together, press the power button and your system is dead, this is the first place I would look for a possible mistake. That’s where I made mine –DUH. If you’re certain that is not the problem, make sure all of your cards and your memory are firmly in place.
If your system doesn’t see some ATA device, and you’ve got 2 devices on one cable it’s probably because you forgot to set the pins on the back of one of the devices to master and the pins on the back of the other device to slave. Most devices have this instruction by the pins on the top rear of the device. Unlike standard ATA/IDE cables, the Ultra 100 cable allows you to use the "Cable Select" setting on your hard drives. After setting the pins on your hard drives to Cable Select or CS, the drive connected at the end of the cable farthest from the motherboard will be Master, and the one closest to the board will be slave. I would rather manually set my devices as master and slave, since I've heard of people having problens using cable select. Make sure the IDE cables are connected to the device with the red or black stripe closest to the power connection. Make sure the IDE cables are firmly attached on all three connections, and the power supply is firmly attached to the device. If you decide to set up a system with only one hard drive, make sure it is connected to the end of the cable (farthest from the motherboard). Systems tend to have problems with that end connection flapping in the wind.
Final thoughts
To call this system fast is to “Damn by faint praise” – it is so fast it’s scary! I did not know programs could load so quickly. I guarantee you will be amazed.
I did not talk about cost much, prices change so quickly, but the system I described with the fancy monitor and recommended software, including shipping, cost me about $2500 in August 2001, and you could build a much better system for about $2200 today. I would estimate that a comparable Dell (P4 2000) would run about $3,400, but that would include a three year system warranty and of course the whole thing would be "plug and play".
I would not attempt this unless you are fascinated by computers, and can consider it a "labor of love". Remember, you will be your own "help desk", but there are many resources available to help you.
If your experience is anything like mine, you will spend many hours over many days on the project, so cost savings amount to only a few dollars an hour. Your true payoff will be knowledge and experience, and the satisfaction of knowing you built a great system yourself.
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Epinions.com ID:
vplite
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Location: Las Vegas, NV
Reviews written: 23
Trusted by: 17 members
About Me:
Computers are great, but the more you know, the more you know you don't know.
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