Xblog

So, what has gone well? The case has been nice and compact, although this would be better appreciated by those that I live with if I kept my desk clear. The power supply on the case died (the main improvement of the updated NSK1380 seems to be the enhanced 80 PLUS Certified PSU). The cheesy slot fan they provide started to die on me, so I took that out. I haven’t yet measured the thermal impact of that, but I must acknowledge that the air flow in the case, what with my two hard drives, DVD-RW and the passively cooled 7600GS video card is somewhat lacking, and I have noticed the case gets quite hot at times (though that might have something to do with stacking junk on top of it, inhibiting airflow out the top vent). My two gripes about the case are a) the front panel doesn’t do advanced audio, instead using a funky variant of the AC’97 standard interface (it has both front and rear audio channels, but there are only two mini-stereo plugs in the front, one for headphones and one for a microphone… what gives?), and b) the sata power connector on it is so short it can’t really reach any of the drive bays unless the drive cage is all the way in, making opening and closing the drive bay tedious.

The graphics card remains an excellent investment (thanks for the pointer Danny). I get zippy performance, stable drivers in both Linux and Windows, and generally no complaints. I will say that for such a compact case it might have been wiser to go with a smaller card with an active cooling system, as it would improve airflow.

The Patriot memory did end up having one stick go bad on me. I’m going to retest it shortly to see if it really was the memory stick that was the problem. The extra voltage needed by the RAM has been an annoyance and probably the source of additional heat. Note to self: pay more attention to voltage needs of sticks when purchasing RAM. In practice I don’t stress the memory subsystem much, so having slower RAM that just works as is is probably the better call.

The Zalman CNPS-8000 continues to plug away. It isn’t doing a great job of cooling the CPU, which might partially be driven by the fact that a chunk of it is jammed directly under the PSU, and partially driven by the fact that the rest of it is right between the PSU and a hard drive, with a CD-ROM right above it. It might also have something to do with the paste I used for it, which doesn’t seemed to have spread as well as it should have. I wish Zalman had bundled their “Super” thermal grease that they bundled with my other Zalman HSF, as it was less viscous and spread easily. Someday I may pick some up along with something else and reapply it to see how CPU temperatures are effected.

My cheap mechanical mouse gave out on me, so I replaced it with a Logitech wireless mouse. It is a very nice mouse with one feature I despise: the fast scroll wheel. I’m sure gamers love it, but it makes it difficult to use the scroll wheel to scroll through web pages precisely. It also seems to not work as a middle mouse button. I’ve been left-right pairing it so far, but at some point I need to read the manual to see what the deal is with that. I’m going to kill someone if this thing doesn’t have a middle click button at all.

Those of you watching carefully have probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned the motherboard. Even shrewder observers will recall I mentioned that the motherboard seemed “a bit touchy”. Well, you can scratch the “a bit” part. It is was ultimately died on me. Reading reviews elsewhere, it seems I am not the first. Things I didn’t like about this motherboard:

• It would periodically fail to power on. If anything this got worse over time. Thank goodness I wasn’t using Windows much, so I could just leave the machine running all the time.
• The IDE connector is horribly positioned. This is an ongoing problem with modern uATX motherboards for some reason, but the F-190 takes the cake for worst positioning yet. It’s pointed to the front of the case, even though no self respecting uATX case would have drives or optical disks anywhere but above the motherboard, with the connectors probably hovering over the middle of it.
• No firewire. This is supposed to be a high performance gaming/AV system. Heck, it has an HDMI connector, but no firewire? Are you kidding me?
• The network controller seemed to not be well supported by Linux. It would work with some kernels (Ubuntu’s in particular), but not others (like vanilla kernels).
• Similar problems with the USB controller. *Every* USB driver I tried with it would eventually hang with large data transfers. No problems from Vista, so it appears to be a software issue. This seems to just be part of ATI’s SB-600 southbridge. It’s so rarely used that nobody cares.
• The built in graphics is too lethargic to be considered for anything other than MAYBE playing videos. uATX folks seem to insist on always having a built in graphics controller, but the built in ones are always too weak to be of much use for anything but basic graphics. This makes sense for some uATX boards, but for a “high performance gaming” board, you should expect people will use the PCIe slot.
• The smaller second ATX connection on the board is placed very close to the CPU socket. This makes it get in the way of non-OEM HSF’s like the one I had. Doubly painful with the NSK-1300 because you’ve got the PSU hanging over it too.
• The board reputedly resets its BIOS settings for RAM voltage from time to time. I never saw this happened, but just having to consider this possibility annoyed me.
• Poor support. The a-bit USA web site never seemed to have any information on BIOS’s/drivers/etc. for this board. It’s almost like they aborted the launch. I had to go to the Taiwan website’s english section to find what I was looking for.
• Ultimately, the board died on me and just wouldn’t boot at all, even thought POST was passing.

After much hemming and hawing, I ended up getting an Asus P5E-VM HDMI. I was originally going for Gigabyte’s GA-G33M-DS2R, but the board appears to have been discontinued, with no apparent heir. I really don’t need the benefits of the G35 chipset, but the G33 uATX boards all seem a little suspect after reading reviews (Intel boards seem like the best bet, but they seem to have low tolerance for high voltage RAM, which I have 4GB’s worth of…), and I just wanted a board that was going to work perfectly after all the F-190 hassles. This board probably cost $30 more than I could have spent with other boards, but that seems like money well spent for piece of mind.

Things I am liking right away about this board:

• It works
• See above
• Asus Q-connector makes it easier to handle all those pesky little connectors from the case
• The secondary ATX connector isn’t too close to the CPU.
• The IDE connector is still inconveniently located, but at least it is pointing in the right general direction (“up”).
• Comes with built-in firewire.
• Comes with fancy enough graphics that I might just consider unplugging the Gigabyte card and maybe use it for another machine. It’s still not good enough for gaming, but it appears to be good enough for everything else.
• Speaking of graphics, how about VGA text not losing a column on the left side with my monitor? ;-)
• It has a nice little mode where it will pause for ten seconds on the BIOS boot screen where it dumps out all that it found out about your system.
• Overclocker’s paradise. I’m not really a big overclocker, but it is nice to know that it is possible.

Things that have annoyed me so far:

• It has 6 internal SATA ports. Come on! This for a **u**ATX box. I can’t imagine a uATX case I’ve seen that could fit 6 SATA devices. Why not move a couple of those SATA ports to the back plate as eSATA ports like some other boards have done?
• Two of the fan connectors are awkwardly positioned by the CPU, this isn’t nearly as annoying as the F-190’s secondary ATX connector, because those wires tend to be long.
• When the BIOS is set to automatically set the correct voltage for RAM, etc., it doesn’t provide any feedback as to what settings it decided to go with. I may just need to read the manual more to figure out how to do this, or set it all manually.
• Vista wouldn’t boot. I need to “repair” the system to fix it. I almost don’t care, so I haven’t investigated this more, but it is entirely likely that this is really a Vista problem, and not a P5E-VM problem.

Two things have emerged from my experiences with the old machine. One is an appreciation for cheap computers. Cheap computers don’t lose much value over time, and they remain useful for remarkably long periods of time. The other, was an appreciation for a small and quiet computer, because the old desktop met neither criteria.

Thus began my search for a new desktop. At first I looked for really small machines. Things like the AOpen miniPC or Shuttle’s X100. It became clear though that such systems involved making compromises in terms of performance and price that I wasn’t entirely happy with. The X100 looked like it almost might be good enough, but it was pricey and it required living with an ATI graphics card that might not make Linux too happy, nor would it be terribly great at driving WoW at 1920x1200. Then I looked at Shuttle’s larger units and some truly exotic stuff like Zalman’s TNN 300 which provides total silence and a very compact size, but is just ridiculously expensive.

In the end I ended up going with the a design built around the Antec NSK1300. It provides a small, quiet enclosure at a very reasonable price, but like the TNN 300 it conforms to the micro-ATX form factor allowing me to choose from a variety of cost effective motherboards, processors and graphics cards. For $100, I got the case and a quiet but efficient 300w PSU. I also snagged an e4300 at bargain rates (hint: the prices will be even better if you can wait until the end of the month). I stumbled across a deal at Fry’s that let me get 4GB of DDR-6400 RAM at a bargain price. The real hard part was coming up with a motherboard and graphics card. It turns out that basically all the built in graphics on motherboards are good enough for normal tasks but tend to be lacking when it comes to games (so bad, even WoW performs poorly). ATI seems to have some nice passively cooled cards in the midrange, but ATI and Linux don’t get along super well these days. After getting some advice from a variety of sources I focused on getting a passively cooled but overclocked nVidia 7600GS based card. That left the motherboard.

It turns out that the combination of micro-ATX and Core2 duo doesn’t give you a lot of options for motherboards. I probably would have had a better set of choices if I’d gone AMD. In the end I went with the abit Fatal1ty F-190HD. The deciding factor is that it seemed to be the only board available with decent overclocking potential, plus it could support up to 16GB of memory, and it was reasonable cheap (Gigabyte has a new micro-ATX board in their solid state capacitor line coming out, but I couldn’t find it for sale anywhere).

That’s when the real adventure started: putting it together. I used to put together machines all the time, but it until recently it had been years since I’d had to. Rusty fingers + cramped confines of NSK1300 = a challenge. I’ll try to get pictures up soon to give people an idea of just how tricky it all was. I upped the ante by throwing in a Zalman CNPS-8000 HSF, which had been selected because Fry’s had it in stock so I could return it if it didn’t quite fit.

As it turns out, the fan just barely fits, with a little bit of scraping of the bottom of the case and the motherboard as they rub together. The memory didn’t fit in easy either (I always find it harder than it should be to get DIMMs in their sockets, but the F-190 took it to a new level). Getting the auxilliary power connector in was a bit of a trick, as the F-190 and NSK1300 conspire to hide it underneath the PSU with maybe an inch and a half of clearance.

The whole ordeal didn’t get to be laughable until it came time to stuff the drives in. I stole the drives from my old system, so I was still going with good old PATA. At some point I realized this wasn’t going to work so well as the F-190 has only one PATA port, so I limited myself to the Windows drive and the DVD-ROM (I always find it easier to move my Linux stuff over to a new drive).

The NSK1300 has a clever fold out drive bay mechanism like a lot of small form factor cases (it is somewhat unique in letting you hang drives off the side of the mechanism). That is all well and good until you look at the PATA cable they provide. It’s one of those ones designed to maximize air flow (good idea, as the case is invariably terribly cramped). Unfortunately, while the length to IDE “master” connection leaves some room for play, the IDE “secondary” connection is just barely far enough away from the end of the cable for it to reach the hard disk bay (no hope of it reaching the side bays). That means you have to hook it up with the drive bay closed. At this point I thought a bit about moving to a country without child labour laws, so I could hire some ten year old with small hands to finish the job.

XP was sufficiently cheezed off with all my changes to the hardware that the old Windows install wouldn’t boot even in safe mode. So, I took the plunge and installed…. Vista Home. That was when this adventure took on a whole new dimension.

The Vista installer kept complaining that my BIOS was not fully ACPI compatible. This was odd to me as the F-190 is a very new motherboard. How could it not work with Vista? How could it have problems with ACPI compatibility. After seeing BSOD after BSOD, I finally found out the problem: I had disabled the SATA controller (sure, I was going to use it later, but not for right now). I’m guessing Vista saw the controller but the ACPI BIOS wouldn’t provide instructions for powering it on, so it got mad.

After that, thing actually worked pretty well. Vista really doesn’t seem to be bad at all. It actually moved all my old windows stuff in to a “windows.old” folder, but amazingly I can still run games and such that were installed on XP. The F-190 has overclocked my e4300 with ease and grace, although I have yet to really push the limits.

So, nitpicks:

• The NSK1300 could really use the nice cable management features that I found in my P150 and most of the rest of Antec’s product line. At the very least it’d be nice if the power cables come out of the top of the PSU instead of coming out of the bottom so that they have to be bent away from the motherboard.
• The NSK1300 has these silly blue LED’s that chew up one of the hard disk plugs from the power supply. Surely these could be powered through the motherboard’s “power on” LED jack, and it’d make cable management much easier.
• The F-190’s BIOS configuration screens somehow use a VGA mode that isn’t agreeable with the DVI interface to my 2405FPW. POST screen works fine. Analog works fine. How weird is that?
• The F-190 seems more than a bit touchy. A couple of times I would plug in the system, press the power button and then: nothing. By reseating the *power cable*, I could get the thing to boot. I’m still trying to decide if this is worth going through the Fry’s return mess.
• Speaking of Fry’s, my F-190 box was missing the back plate. I went back to get one, and they gave me the back plate from a different abit motherboard. Nice guys. That’s the kind of stuff that breeds customer loyalty. How is it that there isn’t some other computer components store that is kicking them out of business?
• I wish Zalman would get off their hardware based fan regulation systems. Just trust the software to do it for you okay?
• The CNPS-8000 came with Zalman Thermal Grease. It compares poorly with Zalman *Super* Thermal Grease that came with my other Zalman fan. I don’t know why exactly, but the latter isn’t all dried up and chunky plus it comes with a brush that makes it easier to spread around.
• While Vista’s UI is cleaned up, its security UI is almost as annoying as those Mac ads make it seem.