Post by Galland on Aug 30, 2003 9:36:51 GMT -5
With eagerness akin to what you might expect nearer Christmas I ordered the following:
Antec SLK3700 case w/ 350w PSU
Abit IC7 mobo
Intel P4 2.4C with HSF (retail)
2x256mb Corsair TwinX XMS PC3200LLPT ram
Sapphire Radeon 9800NP
Samsung 3.5" FDD
Windows XP SP1 OEM CD
And I already had:
120gb HDD
40gb HDD
CD-RW
Issues encountered while building:
1. Could not figure out how to hook up front bezel wires to motherboard 100% correctly- power switch worked but none of the lights light up and I can't figure out how to put all of the individual USB pins on the motherboard's USB header. I hear that in the future all of these front wiring pins will be standardized for ease of installation.
2. Front case structure initially inhibited function of the floppy drive disk- a piece stuck up from the bottom of the FDD slot that rubbed against the rotating disk. Problem was solved by bending offending structure down a little bit.
3. Case manual is very poor. Motherboard manual was almost as poor and both manuals were obviously written by people who don't speak English at a level required for functional literacy.
To make a long story short, everything came together nicely except that I didn't plug in the power switch wires and HDD wires so that they would light up. Then the real fun began: The damn thing crashed left and right except when I tried to play a game. Windows XP error reporter came up with error codes beginning with "BCCode: c2" and other amusing snippets of useless information.
As you might guess, I was not amused. I researched the problem to death and left no part unsuspected. But that didn't last very long. I wigged out and RMA'd both the motherboard and the RAM. As it would turn out, I got things half-way right. Today I did a search for the IC7 motherboard on Corsair's website and found out that their XMS memory pretty much doesn't work with the Abit IC7 motherboard. Doh!
I'd read elsewhere that Corsair was a really good brand of high performance memory. Silly me. I'd been taken in by the hardware review sites. They're dominated by overclocking AMD fanboys, it would seem. No more Corsair for me.
Good points of this experience:
1. Case is very nice except for the front wiring situation. The floppy drive cage and the HDD cage both come out so one can install drives without having to maneuver drives into the case interior. I really like this feature...
2. Installing CPU was easier than I thought it would be- almost foolproof. Of course nothing will ever top the fool proofness of the old "slocket" design". Rumor has it that the next generation CPU will have little round balls instead of delicate HIGHLY DELICATE pins for interface with the CPU socket.
3. The single player MOAA demo and Quake3 were jaw-dropping beautiful on this system. For some reason the ram didn't cause games to crash- just everything else.
Round one over: Users loses, but learns a lot.
Now I'm going to buy an Intel D875PBZ motherboard and a nice, safe, normal pair of 512mb DDR400 Crucial sticks. I shouldn't have strayed from Crucial in the first place. Let me repeat for your benefit: Avoid Corsair ram like the plaigue if you are building a system with the 865 or 875 chipset- it will crash like a Kamekazi 24/7.
Galland
Antec SLK3700 case w/ 350w PSU
Abit IC7 mobo
Intel P4 2.4C with HSF (retail)
2x256mb Corsair TwinX XMS PC3200LLPT ram
Sapphire Radeon 9800NP
Samsung 3.5" FDD
Windows XP SP1 OEM CD
And I already had:
120gb HDD
40gb HDD
CD-RW
Issues encountered while building:
1. Could not figure out how to hook up front bezel wires to motherboard 100% correctly- power switch worked but none of the lights light up and I can't figure out how to put all of the individual USB pins on the motherboard's USB header. I hear that in the future all of these front wiring pins will be standardized for ease of installation.
2. Front case structure initially inhibited function of the floppy drive disk- a piece stuck up from the bottom of the FDD slot that rubbed against the rotating disk. Problem was solved by bending offending structure down a little bit.
3. Case manual is very poor. Motherboard manual was almost as poor and both manuals were obviously written by people who don't speak English at a level required for functional literacy.
To make a long story short, everything came together nicely except that I didn't plug in the power switch wires and HDD wires so that they would light up. Then the real fun began: The damn thing crashed left and right except when I tried to play a game. Windows XP error reporter came up with error codes beginning with "BCCode: c2" and other amusing snippets of useless information.
As you might guess, I was not amused. I researched the problem to death and left no part unsuspected. But that didn't last very long. I wigged out and RMA'd both the motherboard and the RAM. As it would turn out, I got things half-way right. Today I did a search for the IC7 motherboard on Corsair's website and found out that their XMS memory pretty much doesn't work with the Abit IC7 motherboard. Doh!
I'd read elsewhere that Corsair was a really good brand of high performance memory. Silly me. I'd been taken in by the hardware review sites. They're dominated by overclocking AMD fanboys, it would seem. No more Corsair for me.
Good points of this experience:
1. Case is very nice except for the front wiring situation. The floppy drive cage and the HDD cage both come out so one can install drives without having to maneuver drives into the case interior. I really like this feature...
2. Installing CPU was easier than I thought it would be- almost foolproof. Of course nothing will ever top the fool proofness of the old "slocket" design". Rumor has it that the next generation CPU will have little round balls instead of delicate HIGHLY DELICATE pins for interface with the CPU socket.
3. The single player MOAA demo and Quake3 were jaw-dropping beautiful on this system. For some reason the ram didn't cause games to crash- just everything else.
Round one over: Users loses, but learns a lot.
Now I'm going to buy an Intel D875PBZ motherboard and a nice, safe, normal pair of 512mb DDR400 Crucial sticks. I shouldn't have strayed from Crucial in the first place. Let me repeat for your benefit: Avoid Corsair ram like the plaigue if you are building a system with the 865 or 875 chipset- it will crash like a Kamekazi 24/7.
Galland
