Month: March 2004

In an astonishingly moronic move, a woman tries to pass a $1 million bill at Wal-Mart. There’s not much I can say to top that.

A history of some of DARPA’s wilder projects to date. I rather like the ‘killer bees’ idea myself.

Under a proposed new rule by the Bush Administration, it will be legal for companies to screw workers out of earned overtime pay. With amusing cartoon. Frankly nothing this Adminstration does can shock me anymore.

I know that I’m a few articles behind on what has been previously promised, but I just put together a pretty high-spec gaming machine last weekend using an Athlon64 processor, and I’m so impressed that I pretty much have to write about it.

What’s the big deal about this, you may well ask. Well, for the past almost-three-years I’ve been using a system for gaming which I had built during a stint of unemployment in the spring of 2001. Back then it was pretty much cutting-edge, with its 1.33Ghz AMD K7 (“Thunderbird”) processor and 266Mhz DDR RAM, ATA133 drive, etc.

Then again we’re talking computers here. What was cutting edge 3 years ago is barely even fit to sell on ebay nowadays, especially systems built for gaming. This year in particular will see the arrival of a crop of games which redefine the term “abusive minimum requirements”, and it was in fact with one of those games in mind (Unreal Tournament 2004 to be precise) that I decided to build an entirely new system.

As I’ve said in previous articles I’ve always been a very keen follower, voire practically a disciple of AMD when it comes to the PC platform, and I can finally say at this time that my leanings were entirely correct. AMD is seriously kicking some Intel ass in the 64-bit arena. Intel’s Itanium — oft-dubbed the Itanic — is, practically speaking, dead as a workstation/consumer chip, leaving AMD64 the sole major player in that arena of x86-compatible computing.

The Setup

The system is equipped as follows:

• Athlon 64 3200 CPU
• Asus K8V Deluxe motherboard
• 1GB (2x512MB) Kingston non-ECC PC3200 DDR RAM
• 2x80G Seagate Barracuda SATA drives set up as a RAID-0 array
• NEC DVD+-RW drive
• ATI All-in-Wonder Pro 9800 video card
• Antec Super LANBoy aluminum case
• Thermaltake Silent Boost K8 CPU heatsink & fan

The Fan

Since when should one list a heatsink & fan as a major component of a system? Only when one is very impressed with it performance of course. The SB is an extremely quiet (believe the hype on this one) heatsink/fan combo for the K8/AMD64 processor. Using the K8’s built in “Cool and Quiet” feature, the fan starts and stops frequently depending on system load, but you can hardly tell the difference in sound between the two states. Geek-wise this is pretty amazing, given my experience with other Thermaltake heatsinks & fans on the dual-processor system I have built recently and which sounds like a small aircraft (more on the subject in an upcoming article).

The tool-less, force-less tightening device also earns very high marks from this lifelong geek, who’s more than a little used to spending 10-20 minutes in placing a heatsink delicately and correctly atop the formerly small CPU die on Athlon processors.

The Case

As its name indicates, the Antec Super LANBoy is something you’re meant to take along to LAN parties, and it’s built for that purpose. It’s surprisingly light, and frankly I think it only weighed as much as the packaging that came with it. The secret there is aluminum construction and a great deal of optimization when it comes to case size. The case does feature the nice extras which users like myself have become accustomed to, like the easy-mount brackets which place your hard disks right behind the front ventilation fan, and some neat, innovative touches, like an all-purpose drawer next to the floppy bay on the front panel, in which all necessary screws are found.

This is very, very tight case, and frankly I’m lukewarm about recommending it for use with the K8V motherboard becomes the floppy controller is mounted “sideways” on that board, which results in a fairly difficult fit for the mobo when the floppy cable is inserted. Who uses a floppy nowadays? Well, forcibly, anyone using a K8V board. That board’s SATA buses (one Promise, one Via) require the use of additional drivers during the Windows XP installation process, and there doesn’t seem to be a way around that, so you do need it.

Other than the tight fit, this is a great case. It’s very light and uses extra-large, low-speed 120mm fans in front and rear for great ventilation with a very low noise factor. The improved thermal management of the AMD64 processor goes a long way to help in that department too.

The Drives

I’m taking full advantage of the new-ish Serial ATA interface to put two Seagate 80G disks into a RAID-0 array (striped) in order to maximize performance. There’s a lot to be said about Serial ATA, way too much for this article even, so I’ll talk about SATA in general in an upcoming article (yet another one). It’s really “RAID for the masses”. I have the drives connected to the Promise FastTrack 378 controller, although I’m not entirely sure that this works more efficiently than the Via controller; that being said, once the array is built, it’s best to let it just do its work, especially with a striped array.

The RAM

I chose the cheapest PC3200 memory type, mostly because this is a gaming machine (not a server) and does not need to be fault-tolerant. Also I doubt I’ll ever need more than 1GB RAM in this box. I’d recommend the same to anyone at this point.

The Motherboard

This is where it gets interesting. The Asus K8V deluxe is a hell of a board, and it’s loaded with pretty much peripheral a user should need, short of the video card, for obvious reasons. It features not one set, but two sets of Serial ATA raid controllers (a Via and a Promise one), and the Promise controller can also be used to create an IDE RAID array. That’s up to 3 RAID arrays on one PC, without adding a single PCI card, which is damned impressive.

The board also features 6 hi-speed USB ports, two IEEE-1394 ports (“Firewire”, as it is sometimes known), a 6-channel sound chipset, an integrated wireless port (for which a wireless adapter is not yet available from ASUS), and a 3COM 390 Gigabit Ethernet controller. It would be difficult to ask for more on that score.

It also comes with all the internal extras which customers of Asus’s Deluxe boards have come to expect, such as a great level of customization, advanced jumperless overclocking abilities, etc. Again, I’m extremely impressed here. One thing I’ll have to do very soon is change the generic ASUS startup screen and replace it with the CleverShark logo, which is reputedly a very easy process. Yes, it’s a rather cheesy point to harp on, but it’s majorly cool.

Also those extras are essentially what separates the K8V Deluxe from other non-FX boards made for the Athlon 64 chips, since all of them use the same K8T800 chipset.

The Athlon 64 Chip

Obviously this is the “piece de resistance” in this high-tech buffet. Users of other Athlon chips will find that they can take what they know about their CPU and blissfully forget that knowledge when they’re dealing with the AMD64, which rewrites the rules of the game.

For a start, say goobye to the perilously small CPU die of previous Athlon chips — your CPU is now encased in a ceramic sarcophagus, which makes the surface of the CPU completely flat. I cannot emphasize enough how much easier this makes the installation of a heatsink & fan. Also helpful is the use of a plastic “guide” for the heatsink, which is a concept long in use with Pentium 4-based motherboards. No more fried CPUs!

The thermal management of the AMD64 chips is considerably advanced compared to that of previous Athlons. To those of you using leftover heat from your CPUs to heat your apartments/houses, the AMD64 is bad news… it runs very cool. So cool in fact that you’ll notice your CPU fan stops fairly frequently, which will probably cause you to freak out a bit (I certainly panicked briefly when I saw that). Running a previous-generation Athlon without a running fan is not something you can do for very long before smells of burning silicon become evident! This is not a problem in the case of the AMD64, however.

I’m definitely not getting the maximum amount of boost from using a 64-bit chip as I am currently using XP Pro. I know that there is a 64-bit version of XP being offered by Microsoft — in fact I have a copy of it running — but unfortunately it does not as yet have sound drivers for the sound chipset included in the K8V Deluxe; some people have reported success with it, but I’ve had no such luck so far.

Needless to say well-made games, like Unreal Tournament 2003, just fly when used on the AMD64. I can now run the game at a full 1280×1024 (the maximum resolution for my monitor) and full visual detail without choppiness. I’ll be checking out other games — Halo in particular — later this week but I fully expect to not be disappointed. Windows is hugely more responsive on this platform than on my previous gaming box. That being said I can also report a similar performance boost from my dual Athlon 2400 system, but the 64 would seem to be a lot cheaper energy-wise, and has the added advantage of not being so loud while in use that it will drive me insane.

All in all that system has cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500. Not in the “cheapie” range by any means, but I think I’m getting a lot more quality for the money than if I had ordered the system pre-made, and I’m very happy I spend the money.

Al-Qaeda head honchos not the technological geniuses we’ve been led to believe they are. You can switch phones, but if you keep using the same SIM card you might as well not bother.

Spam is 10 years old today. Helping people with thinning hair, tiny penises and no sexual stamina since 1994!

SCO acknowledges that ESR’s It also pretends that Microsoft had nothing to do with the Baystar “hot cash injection”… yeah right.

Microsoft is paying SCO to attack Linux. Scumbags.

Of all the stories surrounding the film I didn’t even know that Jesus had driving scenes in that movie!

Post-911 airport security is a waste of time and money which brings no safety advantage. Putting in electronic print what most of us with at least half a brain have figured out a long time ago…