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Operation Delta 3 - 005
We now start a new thread in the continuing story of The Third Delta Computer which will be called BT. Components have and are being ordered. Going as fast as I can considering the extra workload at work right now.
We changed to a new and "better" system and since I've been back from vacation records of inputs of orders are being kept on leagl tablets using pens and pencils. Anyone got an abacus laying around that I could borrow for a while. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
jaak, in case you missed it I ordered a Maxtor Ultra PCI card (can handle up to 128GB).
What's a good audio card to go with the Asus A7V MOBO and 1GB AMD CPU. Ordered the Mobo without sound. Almost forgot the card untill I was doublechecking my list this weekend. I hope we can get our momentum going again after last week. Just take a little bit I guess. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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Okey dokey everything is saved to disk now. This is one of the reasons I need a second computer up and running. For back up. Don't like losing "stuff". https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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GG1, as to the sound question. I've been using the SB Live! Value on my machines(2) for quite awhile. They're ok as long as you don't install all the "liveware" junk.
But, after seeing good reviews, i'm about to take the dive and go for the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card. A' bit spendy, but might be worth it in the long run...
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God Bless America!!
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I am doing a little test tonight with the new machine...I have nudged the FSB up to 112 from 100....biggest leap this board will let me do under the 200mhz speed....I don't know if I could jumper it to the 266speed and get more out of it but I am not even going to try that...The 1.2ghz Athlon is runnign at 1.344ghz and so far max temp is 39 degrees Celcius. Going to play some games and see if it gets hotter will post back results
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sarrkazztic
Tempting isn't it https://discussions.virtualdr.com/ https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
Yes, give us feed back.
Wonder if it is the same game QOH has where she had to back it down to factory for it to play. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/ Hint https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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so far 1 hour of vicious slot machine play against my wife over the network and the highest temp was 41 degrees celcius. I am going to run this for a few days and see what happens. I will test it tomorrow under TigerWoods Golf 2000....pretty graphics intensive for a golf game.
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Hi folks...
Just a quick review, please. I kinda got confused in the other threads when the subject went from the new Delta machine and repairing Goose's other machine. Where do we stand now? No need for major details, just a rough outline. Thanks.
PS....What does BT stand for? https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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Hell hath no fury like a computer scorned.
MAXXIMILIAN'S
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had to back it down to 111mhz fsb for 1.332ghz had 3 or for lock ups at 112*12 for 1.344..but at 1.332 everything seems good..I played 9 holes of golf and am watching the Lady Marmalade video on streaming video @ launch.com with not a problem and cpu temp is 38 degrees celcius....
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Good Morning All, Thanks for the come backs.
Maxx, Read the opening paragraph. Ordering and waiting on components to arrive. This is the third in a series of Delta computers built on the Hardware forum so members that are interested in building can see what goes on in building one. To some members this is not much of a deal and these same members are helping to get these computers built. Thank goodness because I don't know whether I could have done it without the help when this all first started.
BT stands for Bistro and Train. They originally felt sorry for the Queen of Hearts and myself when we first started and have helped us tremendously. Then came a bunch more members to do the same. The Delta crew was created as a result. There will be a list of names of the Delta Crew on a plate attached to this computer to show that these people all helped in the building of BT. Later https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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Thanks Goose...sorry, I confuse easily. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
BTW...welcome to the land of AMD. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
Make sure you give us a report on the people you ordered your stuff from. Finding a good vendor is always a question that people have when the want to build. I had good luck with CPUsolutions and other people like NewEgg. Did you go for rock-bottom prices or did you go with a place that had a good reputation? Personally, I sacrifice a little cash and go with a place that has had good reviews.
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Hell hath no fury like a computer scorned.
MAXXIMILIAN'S
[This message has been edited by maxximilian (edited 09-18-2001).]
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maxx, I go with the best price as long as the vendor scores 3 or better on performance.
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GG1, I was told that's 128 gigabyte per disk...
if you so wish, I can perhaps try a set up of a raid with four HDD of 40GB, totalling 160GB.
I once did a 80GB raid (two drives), where the card wasn't to blame, but fdisk limit was.
the new fdisk above 64.8GB did it.
the manufactor drivetools failed.
just so you know...
if you attempt to play with a raid with two 40 Giga drives, get that fdisk update..
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Remember, there is always something we forgot to ask.
And, it's only FREE advice!
Kind regards, Jaak
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jaak
The mobo he is getting has the ATA100 built in. Now the card , ATA100, should just pick up the 40GB with out any loss as long as he leaves the last partition alone until the HHD is on the card. Not exactly a raid card per se.
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Hi All, Got home and found my new never been opened Maxtor Ultra ATA/100 PCI Adapter Card waiting for me. The directions say that after instaling the card and confifuring the hard drives (does that mean what I think it means?), power up the system and boot windows. "The Add New Hardware Wizard" will appear which means it has found the new PCI Card. Then you go to start and somewhere along the line you insert the driver disk that comes with the card and so on. So I think I will wait until this weekend to install because of the time factor.
Jaak, I continue to note your comments and save.
Train, Cost was 41 + 5 shipping = $46.00. I purchased this from EMS Computing and it shipped from Ft. Worth. That was a surprize.
No components have arrived by mail yet for BT. Oh well. Just 'cause I say "be patient and take your time" - this doesn't apply to me does it? https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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[This message has been edited by greengoose1 (edited 09-18-2001).]
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Ok here is my report....24 hours running at 111 mhz bus speed for 1.332 ghz on my Athlon 1.2ghz chip everything works great left the machine on all day while at work and also running norton speed disk to optimize the hdd and temperature monitors say it never got higher than 35 degrees celcius....Now help me understand because I do not learn if I just know that something does or does not work....last night when I had it at 112mhz and 1.344ghz it had several lock ups even tho temps were 41 degrees and lower. the pci bus is only overclocked by 4 mhz 37 instead of 33. The only thing that I have noticed is I have no control over vcore it is steady at 1.81 volts...I thought this was a little high for the 1.2 and maybe it is a little low for 1.344 but could it possibly be just right for 1.332.
I will appologize in advance if it seems that I am monopolizing posts around here I am just trying to help others while I pick up some valuable info also.....but I do have a tendancy to ramble on and on.
[This message has been edited by sarrkazztic (edited 09-18-2001).]
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Good Morning All,
Sarkazztic, You are doing just fine. You are not "hogging" the thread. In fact we all learn by what each other posts. Think of it this way. We have to talk about something and we can't build BT until the components all come in.
Jaak, I believe this new PCI card for the Compaq will go right in without much problem. The installation wizard will look at it as an additional piece of hardware and detect it as such. Just follow the manual I would think. Well actually an instruction sheet.
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sarrkazztic,
The 1.81 voltage reading you are seeing is likely not "real". It is likely being overstated somewhat (as much as 5%). The sensor/software combinations are generally not perfect (not for temp readings either). Fortunately, the readings tend to be on the high side. In any case... Even at 1.81 you are within the Athlon Spec. If it were me though, I might tend to lower it a bit just to reduce heating some (not that you have a heating problem).
With your overall setup the likelihood of being able to go above the 111mhz FSB speed was/is small. In fact, you should consider yourself lucky you can keep it stable at the 111mhz speed you have it (many can't).
Your problem is not the voltage, so I would not raise that any. Your limiting factor is the fact that in overclocking the FSB you are not only overclocking the clock frequency used in deriving the cpu's speed, you are also overclocking the memory, ISA, PCI and AGP buses. The timings (speeds) of these buses is a direct fraction (or multiple in the case of memory) of the FSB. As examples, with 200mhz DDR systems such as yours the AGP bus is timed at two thirds the FSB, and the PCI bus is timed at one third. The upward tolerances of these other buses (really the devices on them) is fairly small. The cpu you have could likely handle a bus speed much higher than 111. But your isa/pci/agp devices cannot.
Now with some bioses you can adjust (some) the ratio of the other buses to the FSB. But on yours you cannot alter any timings except the memory (and only to 100 or 133mhz). What that means is at your current 111mhz fsb your PCI bus is running at about 37mhz and your AGP bus us running at about 74mhz. And with your setup that's all the devices on these buses can deal with (without errors/lockups).
Bottomline: the board you have is not well suited to overclocking. It's too restrictive in terms of bios settings. At 111mhz you're sqeezing about all you can out of things using front-side bus overclocking.
Another problem with your board (the bios actually) is that you cannot set/change the cpu multiplier (as I remember). If you could you might well be able to squeeze some more out of the cpu. Many of the 1.2 Athlons (with certain cores) are not multiplier locked. If your's was/is one you could try upping the multipler (from 12). But as I say, on your board that isn't viable.
Note: When the QOH built her machine she used FSB overclocking also to get a little more umph from her machine. In her case she only raised it by like 8 mhz (to 108mhz) as I remember. It ran fine for months. Then one day she started getting errors while playing a particular game. In her case it was evident that the problem was with the overclocked effect on the AGP bus (and thus her graphics card). But until the graphics subsystem was exercised in a particular fashion everything was fine. She ended up setting her FSB back to normal and the problems went away. The point: sometimes it can take a while for a problem with an overclocked system to surface. So keep an eye on things and factor in the overclocked FSB when diagnosing any problems that come along.
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[This message has been edited by DrMDJ (edited 09-19-2001).]
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Jaak (et al),
The 128mb (or other number depending on how you calculate it) limitation is an ATA specification limit, not simply a bios limitation. As such, at this point it in time it applies to any situation that would require addressing (through LBA) space above this, in a RAID situation or not.
As a side note... The most recent update(s) for Windows is needed in order to handle partitioning and formatting of drives above 64 gig (or thereabouts). It should be noted though that while these will allow, and do provide, the capability to partition and format the latest large drives, the number of cylinders shown will never appear greater than 99. This is because there are only 2 digits provided for showing the number of cylinders. The true cylinders are see, just not reflected.
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[This message has been edited by DrMDJ (edited 09-19-2001).]
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DrMDJ, As always just in time with a timely comment. That explains something I was curious about on barriers concerning hard drives. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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No problem Goose. I just say some of the posts, including Jaaks, and... A few months ago I went through this with a guy here who was trying to use something like 2 70gig drives in a raid arrangement. Couldn't get it to work right, even though the system could handle the individual large drives. He was surprised to find that problem was the combined capacity and the ATA limitation. Swapped the drives for 2 60s and all was well.
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[This message has been edited by DrMDJ (edited 09-19-2001).]
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I wish we could give everybody info like this. It could save them big bucks if they have an idea of what hardware will interface with what hardware before they spend the money.
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By the way...
Train, I see where you bought a controller card a short time ago along with a 40 gig drive and had some problems. This causes me to (re)raise an issue that has come up over on the Win98 (and this) forum several times in the last few months.
I have seen problems similar to your's (as well as other manifestations) with drives above 32gig under both Win98, FE and SE. I know the write-up on the MS site regarding a patch for these drives only references issues with Scandisk. But, the problems are more general than that. Sometimes the problems show immediately, sometimes down the road. But they seem to show sooner or later. As a result I encourage anyone with a (or buying) a drive larger than 32 gig to apply a/the patch available from MS.
As I say, the write-up on the patch talks about only scandisk. But the fix itself addresses (replaces) modules beyond simply Scandisk. It includes and update to ESDI_506.PDR, the protected mode driver for IDE type devices. So again, any time a 32+ gig drive is being used the patch should be applied. I have seen a lot of problems go away once it was in place.
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GG1,
It can be tough. There is a lot of hardware (and software) out there these days. And people get caught up in it all and just buy stuff. The problem is that there are interactions between all of what's available. The vendors (generally) really do try to do their best to have everything "get along" well. But there is just so much (and I repeat, software plays a role in this)and there can be so many complexities that it can be difficult to cover all the bases. And in some cases it just isn't possible. So part of the responsibility lies with the buyer/user. They need to put more of an effort in to understanding how this stuff works (alone and together). They need to do some homework. It isn't a matter of having to become an expert, it's matter of just not being guided by impulse to buy alone. Granted, problems/issues will still happen, but...
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Well said DrMDJ. And that's where sites such as VirDr comes in. But initially most peoples first computer will be off the shelf from lack of knowledge. Mine was also. Then you start learning. My Compaq failed and was upraded and repaired at the same time. And as all know I am building what I want now. Again that knowledge needed for me to do so came from members of forums.
There has been a tremendous increase in the number of people improving there hardware in their computers as well as outright building on VirDr in the past year and they are sharing their experiences. And that is pretty neat as people will enjoy there individual computing experiences more. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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[This message has been edited by greengoose1 (edited 09-19-2001).]
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huh, weird, isn't it?
if I read this right
one could do four times 128 normal, non raid
two disks 128 raid mirrored (128)
four disks 64GB resulting in 128 striped-mirrored)
but not four times 128 in any kind of raid
is that correct?
weird.
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Remember, there is always something we forgot to ask.
And, it's only FREE advice!
Kind regards, Jaak
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DrMDJ
I have the upgrade and both the 30 and the 40 did the same, changed brands of harddisk and had success. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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Jaak,
The idea is that under the current ATA specification, such as is used to communicate with IDE type drives, there are 28 bits to work with for addressing sectors (the smallest addressable unit) on a given volume (a "volume" being one or more drives that are seen and treated by the system as one unit, efectively one drive). The 28 bits give you 2**28 of addressability, with a sector being 512 bytes. This amounts to the 128GB (or 137gb depending on how you define a "gig") limitation.
Not to worry though, the new schemes to expand on this are being worked. After all, we all know that 128gb is simply not enough space to collect all the worthless and unnecessary stuff we accumulate on our drives. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
PS. remember, we're just taking ide drives here, not scsi.
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Train,
30 gig was a problem as well? Interesting. Just chalk it up to another one of those subtle nuances between devices.
I had an experience a while back where I had two identical Maxtor drives (same size, model) I was putting on a Promise Ultra100 card. I merrily tried booting up to a dos/command prompt to fdisk and format the drives. No matter what configuration I used, at the DOS level (operating system didn't matter), only one of the drives (didn't matter which one) would be recognized/seen, and only when it was attached to the primary controller on the card. The resolution was indeed strange. I fdisked and formatted one drive, got windows installed on it, then from a dos prompt in windows I was able to fdisk and format the second drive. Once all were fdisked and formatted there were no subsequent problems seeing and accessing either/both drives regardless of whether is was in windows or dos prompt. Like I said, odd. But both drives continue to function without incident.
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[This message has been edited by DrMDJ (edited 09-19-2001).]
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I know what an LED is but why have a connection on the PCI card?
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GG1,
If I didn't know better I would have sworn your question was posted by jaak. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
Are you referring to your new controller card? If so, the connector is there so it can be connected to the led that shows drive activity, otherwise disk activity on drives attached to the controller card will not produce the blinking led display. On the case before me now I have two activity LEDs. So I connect one up to a promise ultra card and the other to the mainboard connector. If you only have one LED you'll have to decide which you want to hook up.
If the above has nothing to do with what you were asking then I didn't understand the question correctly.
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dont forget the obvious..modifying the case so that you can have 3 leds so your power led can be on and have an led for main hdd and also drives mounted to the ata/100 card
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DrMDJ, Like Jaak, did you say like Jaak. What a complement for me - I don't know what Jaak will think much less say. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/ https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
So sarkazztic, do I take it modding rears it modding head? https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
No components in the mail again today. But I have tracking numbers. Does this really make a person feel better? At least we're filling in the time with some interesting posts.
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Goose
Forget about the led instructions, It will read just fine where it is plugged into the mobo.
Dr you listed the bad brand for me. Boot sector all tore up. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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I have been into modding in one way or the other since my first erector set as a wee child...but however My lovely wife bought this new antec case for me and said if I as much scratch it she will do major bodily harm....I believe the term was FUBAR! so I dont think I will be bringing the dremel anywhere near this one......but that doesnt mean I cant do something neat to hers https://discussions.virtualdr.com/ maybe a little window like QoH I only paid 20 bucks for her case with psu included...of course I have since upgraded her to a 300 watt supply also.. But anyway yes If I were to get a ata card which It looks like I am going to have to do I have 2 hdds and dvd and cdrw and I have this space in my new case for internal zip drive that I am just going to have to fill so I would add an extra led for the big hard drive that I would also attach to the ata card. Just dont tell the wife that I am going to drill a small hole in the front panel of this case!!!!
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Hehehehehe LOL https://discussions.virtualdr.com/ https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
Wivws https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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GG1,
LOL. Before worry about any potential modding, let's just get past the stages of getting the parts, installing them, and getting BT working. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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Aw shucks, cain't never have any fun.
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hear hear,
say what?
If I were into mimicry, say, like, you know, like you know, then say, wouldn't that be like, say like Jaak?
AAARGH!!! I am being usurped. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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Remember, there is always something we forgot to ask.
And, it's only FREE advice!
Kind regards, Jaak
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Would someone please help Jaak findhis medication? https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
An amusing story: Once knew a guy who was building a system. it was going to be his "play" system, so it was to be also modified to the hilt. He decided to do the case mods before installing anything. Did a bunch of stuff, including putting in a view window. One day when I saw him and asked him how it was going. He just looked at me and said "shutup". "What's the problem?" I asked. "Got the damn thing all assembled and it won't come up" he replied. My response: "Well thank god you have that window in the side so you can look at all those nice parts not working". https://discussions.virtualdr.com/ Couldn't resist.
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https://discussions.virtualdr.com/ Sometimes I wonder just exactly WHAT these extreme modders actually use the computer for..."Well, it don't really do nuthin', but boy! it sure looks purdy, huh?"
