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 | | | | Apr30Written by:Pete Leoni
Sunday, April 30, 2000 6:00 PM 
For the purposes of this article I am going to assume that most of you have a fairly good knowledge of computers and know how to do things like F-disk and format. If you don't, I bet you have a friend that does. Invite him over, order a pizza, make him some coffee, offer him your significant other.
No, wait a minute, that's going too far.
At least have someone on the hook that you can call to bail you out if you get in over your head. In any case, my intention here is to outline the basic procedures for assembling a bare-bones high performance audio computer from the components that I am using and recommend, and not to go into fine detail.
1. Attach the motherboard to the case using the standoffs that are included with the case.
2. Insert your memory in the proper slots. Consult the schematic in your BE6-II manual.
3. Lift the metal locking arm on the adapter and drop in the CPU (you will see a notch which allows the CPU to drop in only one way) Do not force the chip - it will drop in by itself if properly aligned.
4. Attach the heatsink to the CPU (you'll figure it out) and push the adapter firmly, but carefully into the motherboard. Be sure it is all the way in! I have seen many reports of trouble associated with this simple mistake.
5. Attach the floppy drive (you did buy a floppy drive didn't you?) to the case and run the cable from the board to the drive. Remember the end with the twist in it goes to the floppy and the red stripe always goes to pin 1. You may have to look closely, but pin 1 will be indicated somewhere on the drive. On the motherboard pin 1 will be indicated by a mark in the schematic in the BE6-II manual.
6. Attach your hard drives. Remember that your boot drive needs to be set as master (look on the back of your drive for proper jumper settings) on IDE channel 1, again per schematic in your manual. Remember that pin 1 always goes to the red stripe. (Note that in many cases this will be determined automatically by keys on the cables, but just in case, chant this mantra to yourself over and over: RED STRIPE TO PIN 1, RED STRIPE TO PIN 1 RED…………. Note* I had to place both of my hard drives on IDE channel 1, as master/slave and put my CD-ROM on IDE channel 2 as this was the only way I could get busmastering (more on that later) to work. You may find a different arrangement is necessary. Another note* Even if you plan on running your drives on the ATA 66 bus, you should first install Windows with the boot drive attached to the Standard ATA 33 ports, then switch them over and install the necessary ATA 66 drivers. If you do this out of order, the ATA 66 Port may not be able to "see" your drives and you will get nowhere fast.
7. Put your monitor card in. I will make another recommendation here: get a Matrox G200 display card. They are capable of high resolution and are very reasonably priced at about $60 or less. They are dependable and do not hog up the pci bus, while having more that enough performance to run 2D audio graphics at any reasonable resolution.
8. Get your glasses (if you are an old fart of 40 or more like me) and hook up all of those tiny little connectors that go to the switches and LED's. Interestingly, although it is not noted in the manual, the white wires are usually the common and the multi-colored ones are the positive leads. Polarization does make a difference with LED's. Consult the schematic in your manual.
9. Assuming that you got this far, and everything is hooked up correctly, it is time to set the BIOS. Plug your keyboard, monitor and mouse in the proper holes, plug in the AC and push the switch. As soon as you see the boot screen, push Del and make the proper adjustments to the Soft menu section of the BE6-II bios. In the case of the Celeron 566, we will be setting the FSB speed to 100 mhz and the multiplier to 8.5 or the highest speed possible under 8.5. Note: if your older ABIT motherboard doesn't have an 8.5 multiplier, don't worry: your chip will still be running at 850, as the multiplier is locked at the chip, and is set by the CPU, not the BIOS. You may notice that upon booting up, you will see something like "Pentium III at 806 EB". Don't be concerned! Your cpu is in fact running at 850 Mhz.
10. Set the voltage to "User Define" You will note that the default voltage is 1.5 volts. Increase that to 1.70 volts. That is well within the specs for a Coppermine core (Intel uses even higher voltages on some Coppermine Pentiums) and should cause no undue thermal stress, provided you are using a good fan. Still, a warning is in order: as always, overclocking is to be done at your own risk! Although many, many hundreds of these are performing perfectly, you could be the unlucky one that has trouble. After your computer is up and running stably, you might wish to experiment with lower voltages. There are a number of Celeron 566's that will overclock fine at 1.5 volts. As usual, less is more.
11. Go to the proper section of the BIOS screen and set the drive detection to auto.
12. Use a Windows 98 Startup disk to boot up, fdisk, and format. The Win 98 startup disk is a great program that automates the fdisk and format procedures, and automatically places dos drivers for your CD-ROM in a virtual hard disk that it creates in memory. Using fdisk partition your drives, format using the /z:64 switch so you will get the largest block sizes available (read Catena's articles for more information about setting up your disks, virtual memory and vache for best audio performance).
13. Install Windows of your choice from the CD-ROM, check the DMA box in the hard disk section of Windows' device manager, install the standard busmastering controllers in the hard disk controller section of same, (if they are not installed automatically), install your soundcard, software and get ready to Rock and Roll!
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