Pretty Good Experience Building New PC

[Steven O.]

Hi, all. Since there are postings here all the time with questions
about what kind of system to put together, I thought I'd share my
pretty good experience. After tons of research, I realized I had no
idea exactly which parts to buy, so I went to a local computer store,
MicroCenter, and worked with a pretty knowledgeable sales guy to make
some choices.

I purchased the ASUS A8N-E Motherboard
AMD Athlon 3500+ CPU
1 Gig of Corsair Memory CMX512-3200C2PT (2 500 Meg DDR chips)
Ultra 500 Watt ATX Model ULT-500P power supply
XMDIA GeForce 7300 video card
2 Seagate 160 Gig SATA2 Hard drives
Cooler Master PowerSpec case
Also have a couple of DVD drives, a generic floppy, and a firewire
card.

I'll report my two big glitches up front. First, when initially
putting the system together and powering it up -- before everything
was installed, just to see if I could get video off the video card --
at first there was nothing on screen. Also, the MB refused to power
down when I pressed the power button a second time. It took me a
while to discover that at least some of the new mother boards have
*two* power connectors -- the main, long one, with 24 pins, and a much
smaller 4 pin connector. Once I connected the 4-pin connector, the
system worked fine.

Also, with the Cooler Master PowerSpec case, initially it seemed that
there was no way to remove the front covers where the external drives
are supposed to slide in! I am used to cases where those covers are
simple pieces that just pop out. It turns out that with the Cooler
Master PowerSpec case, you have to remove the entire front cover
assembly. Then there are screws inside which hold in place the
individual covers for the external drive bays. Remove the desired
screws and covers, then put the entire front cover assembly back in
place. (It pops in and out, with a little effort.)

The other glitch with the case was with the rear expansion slots.
They have these plastic latches that you can use to help hold your
expansion cards in place, but it took me some fumbling before I
figured out how to toggle them the hell out of the way so I could get
the expansion cards seated in the first place. Overall, the case
seems very strongly built, but it was a pain to work with until I
figured out the tricks involved. The case documentation was not very
good, either.

Oh, one other glitch. I purchased a Plextor DVD drive, which just
completely jammed up on me, it's now useless. Had to drive to BestBuy
to purchase another DVD drive.

I'm very pleased with the ASUS A8N-E motherboard. I found all the
connectors to be well-placed, everything was easy to connect and
install. The CPU went in with minimal effort. (If you've never
installed a CPU before, the instructions that come with the Athlon are
not terribly helpful. However, at the AMD Web site you can download
both a more detailed set of instructions, with full color photos, plus
installation videos. I found that very helpful, but both really ought
to come with the processor.)

All the fans -- processor fan, PS fan, Mobo fan, video card fan, and
case fans -- run very quietly. Which is a good thing, since I count a
total of about six fans running in there. All my software and
hardware is running well. The motherboard comes with a total of 10
USB 2.0 ports, plus a parallel port, which is helpful if you have an
older printer as I do.

I ran a utility which comes with the motherboard which benchmarks
system performance against some undefined "standard", and it indicated
that my memory reads were running at about 1/2 the speed of the
standard. I went to the ASUS web site, obtained the latest BIOS
upgrade, and how the memory reads are just slightly less than this
"standard", whatever it is.

The only other issue was installing the USB drivers -- the software
that comes with the ASUS motherboard refused to load it's USB drivers,
since I have Win2K, SP3, and it wants SP4 or XP. At first, the USB
ports were running at 1.0 speeds. I went to the Microsoft site to get
updated USB drivers, and the USB ports are now running at 2.0 speeds.
(There is a dramatic difference in speed in transferring data to
external drives over the USB ports.)

The only other issue I have -- see a separate post, which will follow
-- is that the Users Guide for the A8N-E, while generally very good,
does not really explain the use of some of the advanced BIOS settings.

Still, overall, the system was not too hard to put together, and it's
running beautifully, and quite fast. With the possible exception of
the case, I'd recommend this configuration to others.

Steve O.


"Spying On The College Of Your Choice" -- How to pick the college that is the Best Match for a high school student's needs.
www.SpyingOnTheCollegeOfYourChoice.com

 

[Rod Speed]

Hi, all. Since there are postings here all the time with questions
about what kind of system to put together, I thought I'd share my
pretty good experience. After tons of research, I realized I had no
idea exactly which parts to buy, so I went to a local computer store,
MicroCenter, and worked with a pretty knowledgeable sales guy to make
some choices.

I purchased the ASUS A8N-E Motherboard

Try some downloads, quite a few are getting
download errors with the nvidia firewall turned on.

 

[Steven O.]

Try some downloads, quite a few are getting
download errors with the nvidia firewall turned on.

I take your word for it, but I have not had any problems with
downloaded files, they work fine, with the included Firewall. In
fact, one question I forgot to post was, is there any good reason to
use a "standard" firewall, like Zone Alarm, which I'd been using
previously, rather than the NVIDIA firewall, which seems to be working
fine.....

Steve O.


"Spying On The College Of Your Choice" -- How to pick the college that is the Best Match for a high school student's needs.
www.SpyingOnTheCollegeOfYourChoice.com

 

[John Doe]

Hi, all. Since there are postings here all the time with questions
about what kind of system to put together, I thought I'd share my
pretty good experience.

That's nice, but not worth cross-posting to four groups, IMO.

 

[Rod Speed]

Steven O. <null null.com> wrote

That's nice, but not worth cross-posting to four groups, IMO.

Your opinion has always been, and always will be, completely and utterly irrelevant.

You're actually stupid enough to keep quoting the headers.

 

[jack]

:: Steven O. <null null.com> wrote
:
::: Hi, all. Since there are postings here all the time with
::: questions about what kind of system to put together,
::: I thought I'd share my pretty good experience.
:
:: That's nice, but not worth cross-posting to four groups, IMO.
:
: Your opinion has always been, and always will be, completely and
: utterly irrelevant.
:
: You're actually stupid enough to keep quoting the headers.
:

More pearls of wisdom from the resident troll and village idiot? LOL!

j,

 

[kony]

Glad it worked out.

True


Your opinion has always been, and always will be, completely and utterly irrelevant.

False
(but sometimes more important subjectively than true,
objectively)

You're actually stupid enough to keep quoting the headers.

Pot and kettle

 

[Steven O.]

That's nice, but not worth cross-posting to four groups, IMO.

Well, maybe cross-posting to four groups was overkill. (I probably
could have skipped the "chips" groups, I suppose....) On the other
hand, I know when I'm looking to build or buy stuff, I want all the
information I can find. So I was trying to be helpful by including
all the brand and model numbers, etc., so someone thinking of buying
the same stuff can learn from my experience.

Steve O.

"Spying On The College Of Your Choice" -- How to pick the college that is the Best Match for a high school student's needs.
www.SpyingOnTheCollegeOfYourChoice.com

 

[scsisys]

What was the problem with the Plextor DVD drive ??

ray

Hi, all. Since there are postings here all the time with questions
about what kind of system to put together, I thought I'd share my
pretty good experience. After tons of research, I realized I had no
idea exactly which parts to buy, so I went to a local computer store,
MicroCenter, and worked with a pretty knowledgeable sales guy to make
some choices.

I purchased the ASUS A8N-E Motherboard
AMD Athlon 3500+ CPU
1 Gig of Corsair Memory CMX512-3200C2PT (2 500 Meg DDR chips)
Ultra 500 Watt ATX Model ULT-500P power supply
XMDIA GeForce 7300 video card
2 Seagate 160 Gig SATA2 Hard drives
Cooler Master PowerSpec case
Also have a couple of DVD drives, a generic floppy, and a firewire
card.

I'll report my two big glitches up front. First, when initially
putting the system together and powering it up -- before everything
was installed, just to see if I could get video off the video card --
at first there was nothing on screen. Also, the MB refused to power
down when I pressed the power button a second time. It took me a
while to discover that at least some of the new mother boards have
*two* power connectors -- the main, long one, with 24 pins, and a much
smaller 4 pin connector. Once I connected the 4-pin connector, the
system worked fine.

Also, with the Cooler Master PowerSpec case, initially it seemed that
there was no way to remove the front covers where the external drives
are supposed to slide in! I am used to cases where those covers are
simple pieces that just pop out. It turns out that with the Cooler
Master PowerSpec case, you have to remove the entire front cover
assembly. Then there are screws inside which hold in place the
individual covers for the external drive bays. Remove the desired
screws and covers, then put the entire front cover assembly back in
place. (It pops in and out, with a little effort.)

The other glitch with the case was with the rear expansion slots.
They have these plastic latches that you can use to help hold your
expansion cards in place, but it took me some fumbling before I
figured out how to toggle them the hell out of the way so I could get
the expansion cards seated in the first place. Overall, the case
seems very strongly built, but it was a pain to work with until I
figured out the tricks involved. The case documentation was not very
good, either.

Oh, one other glitch. I purchased a Plextor DVD drive, which just
completely jammed up on me, it's now useless. Had to drive to BestBuy
to purchase another DVD drive.

I'm very pleased with the ASUS A8N-E motherboard. I found all the
connectors to be well-placed, everything was easy to connect and
install. The CPU went in with minimal effort. (If you've never
installed a CPU before, the instructions that come with the Athlon are
not terribly helpful. However, at the AMD Web site you can download
both a more detailed set of instructions, with full color photos, plus
installation videos. I found that very helpful, but both really ought
to come with the processor.)

All the fans -- processor fan, PS fan, Mobo fan, video card fan, and
case fans -- run very quietly. Which is a good thing, since I count a
total of about six fans running in there. All my software and
hardware is running well. The motherboard comes with a total of 10
USB 2.0 ports, plus a parallel port, which is helpful if you have an
older printer as I do.

I ran a utility which comes with the motherboard which benchmarks
system performance against some undefined "standard", and it indicated
that my memory reads were running at about 1/2 the speed of the
standard. I went to the ASUS web site, obtained the latest BIOS
upgrade, and how the memory reads are just slightly less than this
"standard", whatever it is.

The only other issue was installing the USB drivers -- the software
that comes with the ASUS motherboard refused to load it's USB drivers,
since I have Win2K, SP3, and it wants SP4 or XP. At first, the USB
ports were running at 1.0 speeds. I went to the Microsoft site to get
updated USB drivers, and the USB ports are now running at 2.0 speeds.
(There is a dramatic difference in speed in transferring data to
external drives over the USB ports.)

The only other issue I have -- see a separate post, which will follow
-- is that the Users Guide for the A8N-E, while generally very good,
does not really explain the use of some of the advanced BIOS settings.

Still, overall, the system was not too hard to put together, and it's
running beautifully, and quite fast. With the possible exception of
the case, I'd recommend this configuration to others.

Steve O.


"Spying On The College Of Your Choice" -- How to pick the college that is

the Best Match for a high school student's needs.

 

[Steven O.]

What was the problem with the Plextor DVD drive ??
ray

Mechanical problem -- probably just a bad drive, not reflective of the
brand. It got jammed in the halfway open position, and would not open
or close. Since the store is about a 40 minute drive from me, it's
cheaper to throw it out than drive back to return it.

Steve O.

the Best Match for a high school student's needs.

"Spying On The College Of Your Choice" -- How to pick the college that is the Best Match for a high school student's needs.
www.SpyingOnTheCollegeOfYourChoice.com

 

[George Macdonald]

I take your word for it, but I have not had any problems with
downloaded files, they work fine, with the included Firewall. In
fact, one question I forgot to post was, is there any good reason to
use a "standard" firewall, like Zone Alarm, which I'd been using
previously, rather than the NVIDIA firewall, which seems to be working
fine.....

I dunno why you'd want a "personal firewall" in the first place. The place
for a firewall is in your router, not on your computer; in fact unless
you're really stupid about browsing, NAT is really all you need... ATM.
Then again products like Skype, which make "invitations" through the NAT
layer are a different ballgame.

nForce4 has had its problems with the hardware network engine which
"assists" the firewall... to the extent that most people do not bother to
to install the Network Access Manager. More recent nForce4 driver packs
appear to have possibly fixed this but I suspect by reduced use of the
hardware engine... meaning reduced performance.

It appears that nVidia kinda jumped the gun on network offloading -
Microsoft has recently released a Scalable Networking Pack which implements
various levels of offload for servers and WinXP-x64 but not for
WinXP-32bit... one wonders why not. It has limited applicablity anyway so
the whole offload situation is a mess... which is going to require a
complete rework of the entire TCP/IP stack.

 

[The little lost angel]

I dunno why you'd want a "personal firewall" in the first place. The place
for a firewall is in your router, not on your computer; in fact unless

Router firewalls generally do not catch "applications" sneaking out
without permission. I cannot limit my email programs from only
accessing a whitelist of pop3/smtp servers from the router either. Nor
can I tell if the newest piece of software I'm trying out is actually
a spyware with the router.

 

[Oldtimer]

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I'm planning a new A8N-E based system now and your info is helpful.

I'd like to know what your original BIOS version was and what version
did you get from the ASUS site.

Thanks.

 

[Tony Hill]

I dunno why you'd want a "personal firewall" in the first place. The place
for a firewall is in your router, not on your computer; in fact unless
you're really stupid about browsing, NAT is really all you need... ATM.
Then again products like Skype, which make "invitations" through the NAT
layer are a different ballgame.

For desktop use I would highly recommend BOTH a router level hardware
firewall (at least NAT) AND a PC level software firewall. The real
key to the software firewall is that it catches OUTGOING traffic. You
would be *amazed* at how much software is doing its best to send out
information without you knowing it.

It appears that nVidia kinda jumped the gun on network offloading -
Microsoft has recently released a Scalable Networking Pack which implements
various levels of offload for servers and WinXP-x64 but not for
WinXP-32bit... one wonders why not. It has limited applicablity anyway so
the whole offload situation is a mess... which is going to require a
complete rework of the entire TCP/IP stack.

TCP/IP stacks are rather fragile things to say the least. If you find
something that works and works well, it's usually best to stick with
it.

 

[George Macdonald]

Router firewalls generally do not catch "applications" sneaking out
without permission. I cannot limit my email programs from only
accessing a whitelist of pop3/smtp servers from the router either. Nor
can I tell if the newest piece of software I'm trying out is actually
a spyware with the router.

Of course an external firewall will not catch the "application" but it's
the port and behavior to that port which matters... and the blocking of
that behavior, including for your e-mail. It varies with the firewall
capabilities but certainly even modest ones are capable of keeping an
entire network clean; even standalone firewalls are not expensive now.

Sofware firewalls do not work with TCP/IP offloading, which was the point
of the nVidia hardware assisted firewall... except it has *not* worked out
very well. The behavior of software firewalls, including Windows Firewall,
is almost as bad as the spyware you are hoping to catch - they do *not*
work well, and even interfere, with a modern network infrastructure. Even
Microsoft's efforts fall far short: "TCP Chimney offload and NetDMA" do not
work with Windows Firewall, nor any 3rd party firewall - Microsoft does not
elaborate on what "do not work" actually means. IME a network which "does
not work" has cost me a lot of time and trouble in the past.

 

[The little lost angel]

Of course an external firewall will not catch the "application" but it's
the port and behavior to that port which matters... and the blocking of
that behavior, including for your e-mail. It varies with the firewall
capabilities but certainly even modest ones are capable of keeping an
entire network clean; even standalone firewalls are not expensive now.

I've not seen a router firewall that will let me tell it to block port
80, 443 for email clients and other dubious software attempting to
dial home via http but still allow my browsers to go through. Maybe
those $10K a pop enterprise routers/firewall are capable of analyzing
higher OSI layers to achieve this, but most of us are on a much
smaller budget. pPp

very well. The behavior of software firewalls, including Windows Firewall,
is almost as bad as the spyware you are hoping to catch - they do *not*
work well, and even interfere, with a modern network infrastructure. Even

In what sense? The only problem I face with my network and the
software firewall is the simple fact it takes processing power (<10%
during heavy traffic) and inexitably add some latency to packets (not
a major concern unless you're gaming). Which is a small price to pay
for the added security and control.

 

[chrisv]

scsisys top-posted:

What was the problem with the Plextor DVD drive ??

104 lines for that, huh?

 

[George Macdonald]

I've not seen a router firewall that will let me tell it to block port
80, 443 for email clients and other dubious software attempting to
dial home via http but still allow my browsers to go through.

That should be a feature of the e-mail software - it *is* on Mozilla's
e-mail clients. Even 10 year-old Eudora had it.

Maybe
those $10K a pop enterprise routers/firewall are capable of analyzing
higher OSI layers to achieve this, but most of us are on a much
smaller budget. pPp


In what sense? The only problem I face with my network and the
software firewall is the simple fact it takes processing power (<10%
during heavy traffic) and inexitably add some latency to packets (not
a major concern unless you're gaming). Which is a small price to pay
for the added security and control.

In what sense? I just told you but you snipped it out. Firewalls do not
work with advanced network interface features... the things which chipset
mfrs are touting as new, advanced, desirable features. They cause problems
with accesing a domain; Windows Firewall has a sub-component service,
Windows Firewall Internet Connection Sharing, which is not even stopped
when Firewall is disabled, which severely degrades high speed local area
network performance. As for latency, from my POV, on LAN access, that is
one of the most annoying things of all.

 

[George Macdonald]

For desktop use I would highly recommend BOTH a router level hardware
firewall (at least NAT) AND a PC level software firewall. The real
key to the software firewall is that it catches OUTGOING traffic. You
would be *amazed* at how much software is doing its best to send out
information without you knowing it.

You mean for "home" desktop use? Windows Firewall has no place on even a
small business LAN.

TCP/IP stacks are rather fragile things to say the least. If you find
something that works and works well, it's usually best to stick with
it.

If we are to "benefit" from new advanced chipset NIs, something's going to
have to be done.

 

[Tony Hill]

You mean for "home" desktop use? Windows Firewall has no place on even a
small business LAN.

Yes, I should have specified "home" use and not office use.
Presumably in the office I wouldn't be installing nearly as many
programs and browsing websites that are somewhat questionable (and
therefore might try to exploit holes in web browsers). Also the
network admin at work is going to be monitoring trends in network
traffic and would notice a spike in outgoing traffic if I were to pick
up a trojan.

If we are to "benefit" from new advanced chipset NIs, something's going to
have to be done.

Perhaps, though I'm not sure how big a worry it is. Certainly for
100Mbit/s networks there is no real need at all. For gigabit and
10Gbit/s server connections, then I guess it becomes more of a
concern. However when you're dealing with servers, all the rules
change about networking stuff.