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 | | | | Apr30Written by:Pete Leoni
Sunday, April 30, 2000 6:00 PM  The Case
Let's begin with the case. For our purposes we need at least a mid-tower ATX case. These have at least three 5.5 inch drive bays, a couple of 3.5 bays and most important of all, plenty of room for air to circulate. Most of the items we are going to discuss today I am going to recommend that you purchase on the web, but the case is one that you might want to consider getting locally, as any savings you may accrue will most likely be eaten up with shipping charges. In any case, (no pun intended), an ATX mid-tower case with a 250 to 300 watt power supply should cost you around $70. One more thing, if the case you find has only one fan (and most do) it would be a good idea to add and additional fan to the front of the case, where you will likely find a port made this purpose
The Motherboard
For our purposes, we will use the ABIT BE6-II. This board still uses the Intel BX chipset which unbelievably is still the highest performing desktop chipset on the market. Although it does not officially support higher bus speeds than 100 mhz FSB, its memory performance and compatibility still make it somewhat of a better candidate that the VIA Apollo boards. Simply stated, the BX chipset has inherently better performance than the only other reasonable alternatives at this time.
Because we are going to be running the Celeron 566 overclocked to 850 at 100 FSB, this board with it's jumperless soft menu setup is the ideal candidate. The BE6-II has three dimm slots, which can hold over 768 Mbs of cacheable memory, 5-pci slots, 1 ISA and one AGP slot. Consider as well the ABIT Soft Menu. This menu eliminates the typical jumpers found on other motherboards. All parameters of the BIOS including CPU speed (up to 1000+ Mhz), CPU voltage, multiplier etc. are set in software from the computer screen.
The BE6-II incorporates an on-board UDMA/ATA 66 controller, as well as standard IDE controllers. Not only will this allow you to use up to eight IDE devices, but will also allow the use of future hard drives that will soon exceed the 33 Mbs limit of the standard ATA 33 controllers, an important point. Another nice feature of all ATX boards is that all external connectors (i.e. parallel, serial, USB, mouse, etc.) are directly mounted on the motherboard itself, thus eliminating the need for cables and one more source of confusion when assembling the computer. The ABIT BE6-II is widely available around the web for about $110 to $130 dollars
The Memory
The speed of today's systems and buses are rapidly increasing to the point where memory is starting to become the weak link in the chain. Therefore always buy a major brand memory that meets or exceeds the PC 133 spec, in doing so you will ensure that the memory will be fast enough to keep up with whatever CPU you choose to install, whether it runs at the 100 or 133 Mhz clock. Be aware of the fact that future FSB's are likely to exceed the 133 Mhz, so it may be a good idea to be prepared. I use PC 133 CAS 2 memory which costs a little more, but the extra insurance is worth it. You will pay about $175 for 128 Mbs of high quality PC 133 CAS 2 memory. I would consider 128 MBs to be the bare minimum in a DAW and would recommend 256, especially if you are using soft synths such as Gigastudio.
The Hard Drives
Here again I can make a specific recommendation. The best choice at this time is the Maxtor 40 series DiamondMax Plus drives. The Maxtor 40 series run at 7200 rpm and incorporate high-density platters that allow them to achieve sustained transfer rates of nearly 30 MB/s. That is no misprint, and yes it is more than twice as dense and fast as the original Maxtor 2800 series drives used in the first incarnation of the "Roll You Own" computer.
Nashville producer Brian Tankersley reportedly routinely streams over 60 24bit audio tracks off of one of these drives. A lot has been said in the past about using a separate drive for audio, and it still is a good idea for the very best audio performance, but I feel that these new Maxtor drives are so fast and reliable that the majority of users could easily get by using only one of these drives when properly partitioned. You can find these drives around the web (and often on special at your local computer super-store) for about $150 to $250 depending on the size. I would recommend buying the largest you can afford. Remember, 24 bit recording is here, and it is 1.5 times more "drive hungry" than 16 bit recording. 24/96 recording will simply eat a small drive alive - and plug up your CPU quick. 'Nuff said.
There is another feature available now, and that is removable hard disk bays. If you are used to backing up your disks to CD-R or DAT so that you can reformat your audio disks for the next project, have we got a deal for you. For as little as $20 you can install your audio disk in a unit that makes it a removable drive. Since a 20 GB disk is easily capable of storing all the audio from a music project, and since said disks are already cheap at under $200 each, it really makes sense to put these disks in a removable drive bay. When the project is complete, just pop the disk out and toss in another. Inclose makes a decent and quite affordable drive bay. Kensington makes a more expensive and robust drive bay as well.
Note that if you wish to have two removable disks, you can. But on most computers this will require you to set up all your disks as slaves (so that any disk will work in either drive bay), and set up your boot disk and CD-ROM as master devices. Some CD-ROM drives do not like to be master devices. Fortunately, Yamaha CD-ROMs seem quite happy as channel masters, and Yamaha CD-ROM drives are also great CD burners, so again we can categorically recommend the Yamaha CD-ROM drives.
The CPU
As mentioned above we are once more going to take advantage of the ability of the Celeron chip to be successfully overclocked (read above for more info). Because the Celeron 566 is a FCPGA socket 370 device, and our motherboard is a slot one board, we are going to use a Celeron 566 in combination with a FCPGA "slocket adapter".
Be sure to order an adapter made specifically for the Coppermine FCPGA chips: the earlier PPGA adapters will not work and may damage your chip!
Although many "slocket" adapters exist, I prefer those made by Matrix (available from Advanced Designs of Kentucky for around $20) because of the lack of confusing jumpers which could easily cause you to burn out your chip if set incorrectly. When using the Matrix device and the ABIT BE6-II, all voltage settings will be done on-screen in the BIOS, where they are easily visible.
Another good recommendation is the ABIT adapter which does not require jumper settings when using it with ABIT boards. A number of people have had good success with this slocket adapter.
If you use another brand of adapter, be sure to set all of the jumpers in the appropriate positions, usually the default. Caution! It is very easy to burn out your chip at this step! Be sure to get a good heatsink at the same time you purchase your chip, because we are going to be raising the voltage above the standard and it is good insurance against overheating.
I highly recommend that you purchase you Celeron 566 pre-tested at 850 Mhz from many of the online venders who specialize in selling them. Many of these dealers will sell you a pre-tested unit which consists of CPU Adapter and heatsink tested together as one unit. To me it is well worth the extra money. Remember this although the majority of these chips have no trouble reaching 850 Mhz, if you don't get a pre-tested unit, it is possible that you will be stuck with a chip that will only run at 566 Mhz! At the time of this writing, you can purchase pretested Celeron 566 CPUs from Advanced Design as well as others.
Note to Existing Roll Your Own Owners
As you read through the specification for the Roll Your Own 2000 computer, you will quickly notice that it is very similar to the design of the original Roll Your Own. That's no mistake. Most of the design decisions made in the original Roll Your Own computer are still valid decisions today.
That's great news. Because if you already have a Roll Your Own computer, we can quickly cut to the chase: the best way to spend your money today is simply to replace your existing Celeron 300A chip at 450 MHz with a 566 chip at 850 MHz. Your computer will scoot like a scalded alligator.
Current UDMA/33 controllers can already support the performance of today's fastest drives. Since your current drives (as well as any drives you're likely to add any time soon) don't require UDMA/33 for top performance, you can keep your current BH6 motherboard. Your existing 100 MHz RAM will work fine. And since we're not changing the motherboard, your other peripherals should be completely unaffected.
So - for about $200 - you can just about double the performance of your existing Roll Your Own computer. All you need to do is update your ABIT BH6 motherboard with the latest BIOS update from ABIT, and set up the BIOS. The only changes you need to make to the BIOS are:
1. set the voltage to 1.7V
2. set the multiplier to 8 (though it really shouldn't matter, see below)
3. set the "Speed Error Hold" to Disabled
Note that the BIOS updates for the BH6 Rev 1.1 are different from those for previous versions. Make sure you get the correct update.
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