Building Your Own Graphics Workstation, Part Three

Tutorial

Building Your Own Graphics Workstation, Part Three
Page 4 of 6

Turn the M*therf*cker on

Has it been worth it? Are you past the danger point? Is all the hard work over? I laugh at you. Although the hardware installation is pretty much complete, there’s quite a bit more to do still, not to mention the non-enviable task of installing Windows 2000Pro and all your software. If you’re going with XP, make sure you’re using XP Pro. XP Home has a host of networking issues and will not work with some high-end graphics apps.

Grab your keyboard, mouse and monitor and hook them up to the machine. You can plug in the rest of it (speakers, scanner, digital cameras, etc.) once you install Windows and its drivers.

Check the machine inside and out and make sure the connections are all proper and that there are no gerbils caught inside. Keep grounded; you don’t want to go shooting off bolts of lightning at this point.

Now, you may want to do whatever little dance or ritual you do for luck (mine is to tap the power supply with my finger a couple times, guzzle half a bottle of gin and step on a puppy. Kittens do if you’re out of puppies). Turn on the power supply switch in the back. With the cover off, you’ll notice a green LED on the motherboard turn on. This indicates that a 5V power source is on and feeding the board, even when the system’s off. If you see flames shoot out, or smoke start to billow, there’s something wrong and you’ve probably blown out the power to half the block, including the hospital down the street. See all those people in hospital gowns running around looking for batteries for their cardiac machines? Yeah, that’s your fault.
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If you didn’t manage to short out the power supply switch, here’s your chance to take out the state power grid: Reach around the front (hello!) and hit the main power switch on the case. Everything should whir up and the PC will beep and start to POST. POST is the power up self-diagnostic and run-up the hardware goes through whenever you turn on the power. I think it stands for Please Offer me Sandwich on Toast.

At this point, read up on the BIOS settings in your motherboard manual to get familiar with the hardware settings. At first you’ll want everything to be at the most stable settings. Within the BIOS, you’re able to set and tweak system performance for the better; but sometimes it comes at the risk of stability. The settings here, along with improper Windows drivers, are probably the top cause of system problems, freezes and blue screen crashes in Windows. You enter BIOS settings by pressing the delete key when the machine powers up and starts to POST.

The BIOS (a.k.a. CMOS) settings allow you to set voltages and frequencies for most of the hardware in the box (especially with this motherboard), so you have to be careful to find the best balance. For that reason alone, I do not recommend overclocking. Overclocking is when you set the frequency of your CPU to a higher state than it is rated, to get higher performance. Whenever you up the frequency, you do so to your PCI/AGP cards and memory. Even though a CPU may be able to handle higher clock frequencies, some other components may not. Strange results may become your bedfellows when you try to over-clock. And they always snore loudly and kick a lot. Once you power on, the board should automatically detect your CPU and set its BIOS properly. The CPU speed is governed by the motherboard with a clock frequency (how fast electricity is pumped through it) and a multiplier. The clock frequency sets the frequency of the entire system (100 or 133MHz) and is multiplied by four to get the Front Side Bus of the board (FSB of 400 or 533MHz). Your P4 CPU will either be 400 or 533MHz FSB, so the system frequency should be set to 100 or 133MHz respectively. With the 2.53GHz CPU, we’ll be running at a 133MHz System Frequency (which is x4 to get 533MHz FSB). If you noticed during the power up that POST reads a slower CPU than you have, you’ll have to change the BIOS settings manually to get the full speed. The important BIOS switches should have settings like these:

System Performance: Normal
CPU Frequency Select: 133 o – OR - System Freq. (CPU:RAM) : 133:100
DRAM Frequency Select: 100 x 2 to start with
Ratio Select: Auto (may not appear on some BIOS)
x CPU Clock Ratio: 20x (may not appear in some BIOS)
Onboard 6Ch H/W Audio: Enabled
Onboard IDE RAID: Enabled
Onboard (10/100) Lan: Enabled

If your BIOS is laid out differently, don’t fret, the basics are the same. For example, today’s downloaded Soyo book on this motherboard lists slightly different BIOS settings than what I have in my BIOS on this board from three months ago. Refer to your book for the specs. The Soyo board should already be set to the basic default settings and have the right CPU settings to begin with. If your CPU speed is not set right, go into BIOS (by hitting the delete key while the system is about to POST) and make the proper adjustments before continuing.

Your machine should boot straight into a missing operating system error once you reboot from BIOS. This is fine as we have not formatted the hard drives or installed Windows. Insert the floppy diskette that came with your hard drives and reboot. Follow the hard drive maker’s procedures for partitioning and formatting once their program loads. If you have more than one hard drive brand (like we do, with two Maxtors and a WD), make sure to use the proper setup disk for the proper drive (i.e., don’t setup the WD disk with the Maxtor floppy or vice versa). Once the hard drives are ready, pop in a Windows boot CD and boot from it into the Windows Setup. Follow the prompts and instructions to install Windows to the system drive (C: the 20GB Maxtor).

During setup, Windows gives you the option to format the partitions with either FAT32 or NTFS file systems. I don’t know the specifics of what the difference is between these file systems, but NTFS is usually more stable and secure than FAT32. Only problem is, NTFS is only compatible with Windows 2000Pro and XP Pro. Earlier Windows (like MS-DOS, 98 or Me) cannot see NTFS drives. FAT32 is a fine operating system and provides the best compatibility overall, especially with multi-boot systems.

If you’re not apt to moving your drives around or to having more than one OS, format most every partition using NTFS, but keep a small FAT32 partition to access regardless of OS. We’ll learn why in a moment. Besides, within Windows 2000 or XP, you can have NTFS and FAT32 at the same time, that live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano keyboard, oh lord, why don’t we?

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