The new machine...

[vakkotaur]

The memory arrived yesterday and was installed last night. Pulled pasofino from the office and put it back in the machine room (still need to reconnect it there). Put belgian where pasofino had been in the office. Found I need a couple PS/2 cables but can run without them for now - I just have two trackballs on the desk instead of one.

A quick look through the BIOS settings (did I mention this machine is fast? I have to hold the DELETE key in almost as I press the power button or it goes right into booting) showed all to be well. The CPU (Athlon XP +2100 - ~1.7GHz) ran just over +90F as I first looked.

Mandrake 9.0 installed quickly. A bit of a wait for drive formatting but not all that long. I've waited longer for DOS formats of smaller drives. The only glitch was not selecting the right video driver the first time, but a check of the motherboard manual showed what to select and all is well. Okkay, almost all. The splash screen before thing really start is... well, distorted hardly begins to describe it, but once that's past the video is fine.

I expect I'll spend much time (likely Saturday) installing the software I want. One snag was xchat. The latest and allegedly greatest is very bleeding edge (wants gtk2 or later..) so snagged an earlier version. Still need to get stuff to make it happy, and that stuff wants yet other stuff. Not exactly desktop ready, it seems. ("It's dependencies all the way down!")

Everything, as far I could tell, works. And after running belgian for a few hours I checked the temperatures again. The system temperature was a bit higher, but not out of line, and the CPU temperature was still hovering just over 90F, so I set the BIOS to do the thermal shutdown at the lowest setting (something around 170F as I recall) it had that wasn't "OFF."

Saturday should be... interesting. But my only difficulties seem not to be with the hardware. It just works. I like that.

Comments

[shelbystripes.livejournal.com]

90F is not bad. Better, in fact than my Athlon box before I loaded it full of fans. Of course, temp in the BIOS and temp at full load is another thing. But you shouldn't see a dramatic jump.

What's the motherboard make/model? Integrated video, it sounds like? Curious minds wanna know.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Microtel box from Wal-Mart with a MSI motherboard (MS-6390). Integrated audio & video. Nothing really fancy, but will do what I need. If I do decide to use an expansion card for something, it is an option. AGP slot and three PCI slots available.

[shelbystripes.livejournal.com]

A-ha. VIA ProSavage graphics. I've got that in my laptop. It's not great, but it's not bad either, it just kinda works.

On the mobo, what's the southbridge model number? It seems that that particular model has two revisions, one with the 8235 and one without. The one with 8235 will have a chip on it below the PCI slots that says "VT8235" under the VIA logo; any other will have a chip with another "VT82xx" number, like "VT8231A" or something.

The reason I'm asking is that the 8235 southbridge makes all the difference IMO between a good VIA board and a bad one; besides adding USB 2.0, it also includes fixes to the PCI implementation problems the VIA has had since the days of Socket-7 boards. They used to have massive latency problems and the only real solution was to increase the latency, which of course caused major performance problems with anything on the PCI bus. Since you're the kind of person that's willing to use integrated video, I doubt that the performance difference between the southbridge revisions would even be noticeable to you, but being a total PC-hardware geek, I'm curious to know what you ended up with.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

The motherboard manual refers to both 8233 and 8235. I think when I looked while I had the case open (not a trivial thing to do now that belgian has been emplaced) that I saw 8235.

I've not run into any problems with VIA chipsets, myself, but then I don't go for bleeding edge video and such, either.

[shelbystripes.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you're pretty well set for the future. That motherboard isn't gonna support 8x AGP, but I don't get the feeling you're gonna need it, and it has everything else (support for practically all ATA drives, USB 2.0, etc., a working PCI implementation, etc.)

The one thing I'd personally recommend is throwing down ~$50 (at most) for an AGP video card. If you're gonna be in X a lot, that is. You could get a Radeon (anything between the 7000 and the 8500 should be enough, or more than enough, for you) and this range of cards has stable 3D-accelerated XFree86 support. (There's actually two flavors of support for these cards; the open-source DRI support, and the closed ATI binaries that they provide.) Barring that, you could always get an Nvidia card, but the open-source drivers for them aren't so good, as they're not so forthcoming on the specs of their cards.

There might be a noticeable improvement for you there, both since you'd have some good 3D-accelerated X going on and because you wouldn't be using main system memory for your video display anymore. But then again, there might not, either, depending on how picky you are.