Xblog

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.