Building Your Own Graphics Workstation, Part Three
Page 5 of 6
OK, once you have Windows running, get the Soyo CD and install the network card drivers installed so you can get access to the Web via DSL or whatever you have (or install your modem software). You’ll want to download the newest drivers from the Soyo site to install the rest of the gear. Once you download all of them, go ahead and install all the new hardware Windows found using these drivers (as opposed to the CD's drivers). Chances are the drivers on the CD are already outdated. Notice I have no pictures of the Windows install? I’m not going through that hell needlessly again!
Start with the AGP drivers and move on from there for the other components on the motherboard (IDE, then RAID, graphics card, then USB, then sound, then the new network drivers and then whatever else). Whenever Windows advises you to reboot after a driver installs, reboot before installing the next driver. Best to have a nice clean ordered install of all the system drivers. Plus it gives you a chance to get up and pee a whole bunch. Hopefully in the bathroom, but that’s really up to you.
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Now here’s a small snag with the whole NTFS/FAT32 thing. Norton Ghost 2002 can image an NTFS partition or drive, but it cannot write to an NTFS drive or partition, so if you’re going all NTFS, keep a 10Gb or so partition as FAT32 so you can image your C: drive to it as a backup. I can’t tell you how much time this saves when you like tinkering with your system and adding software all the time. That’s why we’re keeping only Windows and Norton Anti-Virus and hardly anything else on the C: drive, to keep the imaging fast and small. Just install your other apps to the D: drive.
All right, once you can boot into Windows and everything is humming along nicely at the motherboard’s default or safe settings, you can go back and tweak the BIOS settings to eek out a few more drops of power. The best thing to try first is adjusting the memory clock speed. The Crucial RAM I got supports up to 266MHz, though you can get faster 333MHz ram from Crucial when this article finally gets done.
Reboot and go into BIOS. Select SOYO COMBO FEATURE. Turn up the RAM frequency (in MegaHertz) to 266 or 333 if you bought the faster RAM (the settings are 133x2 and 166x2 respectively), and reboot. Live with the system for a little while and see if you get errant freezes or BSODs (Blue Screens of Death). When your system acts unstable at a higher RAM setting, ratchet it back down. Although you get some nice bandwidth from the faster clocked RAM, lack of stability is not worth it. At 266MHz, your two Crucial sticks should perform without a hitch. Do not clock your RAM higher than it (or the motherboard) is rated to go (333MHz for this board).
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Regarding this chipset difficulty: I got strange lock-ups with the three Corsairs in the machine, but none with just two sticks. It would usually reboot during the night wile I was running the CPU-intensive SETI@Home screensaver/alien finder. With the two sticks of either Crucial or Corsair in the machine, the machine has been rock steady running 24/7 for the last three months, with the nights at 100% CPU usage with SETI@Home cranking away trying to find some pattern to the universe around us. All I know is it keeps coming up with the number 42. Figure that out.
The main setting for memory speed is its clock rate (MHz setting) found under SOYO COMBO in BIOS, but there is something called CAS latency as well. CAS, which stands for Can I have A Sandwich, maintains a timing for data flow in and out of the memory modules. The higher the CAS, the lower the bandwidth. Typically you’ll get a CAS of 2.5 on two sticks for both these brands of RAM at 266MHz. But if you try to get down to CAS of 2 or 1.5, things get a bit nutty the more sticks you have; BSODs, freezes, reboots, Ninjas falling from the ceiling to drink all your low-fat milk and leave the empties in the fridge.
If you’re having trouble at 266MHz or 333MHz, you can try to ratchet up the CAS a bit instead of bringing down the overall frequency of the memory. This will give you fast memory but more reliability than before. You’ll probably see a CAS of 2.5 with two sticks at 333MHz for optimum stability and speed. You can find the CAS settings under Advanced DRAM Settings (Or Advance Tune Up Settings) under SOYO COMBO in the BIOS. The easiest thing to do is to set the System Performance Option in SOYO COMBO to “Fast” before fiddling with the individual CAS setting. The board should be set to Normal operation to begin with. Setting it to Fast and then Turbo will increase several memory frequencies and CAS settings together, making it easier to clock the machine faster. But keep in mind: it may cost you stability. Going up to Fast should be stable, but if not, try adjusting the CAS and RAS to higher latencies before going back down to Normal performance.
The difference between these RAM tweaks is certainly not enormous; you would be hard-pressed to really notice the difference in every day use. I stress stability more than anything for my computers. Too bad that’s not so with the women in my life, but what can you do? Another BIOS settings you’ll mess with will turn on and off the RAID functionality of the board. If you are plugging hard drives into the IDE3 and IDE4 (yellow) ports, you’ll need to make sure they are enabled in BIOS. Under the COMBO feature in BIOS, make sure Onboard IDE RAID is enabled. Otherwise, your third and fourth IDE connectors will not work, so the hard drives connected to them will not be seen (keep in mind CD drives are not supported on these IDE channels at all).
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The Advanced BIOS features should all be set to the default settings. Not much in there to play with right now, or in the rest of the BIOS sections, for that matter. If you run into serious trouble, and can’t figure out what to change back in the BIOS, you can load the fail-safe BIOS settings to get your PC to boot up again. I would just keep track of what you change and what instabilities it may cause on a sheet of paper as you tweak your system. Of course, it’s far easier just to set it all at Normal System Performance and not worry about it. But if you’re like me, you’ll want to go as fast as you can as safely as you can. Unless you’re in a school zone, in which case you should go slow, but remember only when children are present. Otherwise, drive fast and drink a lot (this is sarcasm, don’t actually do it). OK, that’s it. We’re done. By now you should have at least slightly less fear about messing with the guts of a PC, and at most, a brand new blazing fast system you built from scratch. Or, perhaps now you’re $2,000 poorer and have a smoking pile of metal and silicon ash in the middle of your living room floor.
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