New Computer (and new things)

New Computer (and new things)

By Merle Nicholson, President, Tampa PC Users Group

As some in the club may know, I build computers in very small volume as a side business, and I’m always looking out for new products and ideas. I’ve built two of these particular PC’s – one of them for myself, and I’m especially pleased with the results. It is certainly an extremely fast machine using the new AMD K6-3/450 processor. You’ll have to go to the AMD web site to look at the benchmark numbers, but they make a case for this processor being faster than the new Pentium III at much less cost.

I chose the components pretty carefully, trying not to spend much more than I had to, given my goal of making a very fast machine. One thing that caught my eye in looking for performance components was a motherboard that had 2 MB of cache on board. Now this is very unusual. Most boards have 512K, one-fourth of this new board, and the Pentium boards have none, dependent instead on the L1 cache built into the chip or L2 cache built onto the little plug-in board next to the processor.

One characteristic of this AMD processor is that it will handle 2 MB of external cache, so it was interesting that I found a motherboard with just that. The other interesting feature is that the chip itself has both L1 and L2 cache built into the chip that runs at the chip speed. So the 2 MB on the motherboard is a Level 3! I combined the board and processor with a pretty good 16 MB Diamond Monster Fusion video card and a Quantum 7200 RPM, 9.1G hard drive with Windows 98 SE.

A low end machine typically uses an AMD K6-2/400 or Celeron processor and a slightly smaller hard drive and 32 MB of memory. This PC is only about $300 more at about $1350 with a 17" monitor.

ATX form

The board in this case is an ATX form. If you’ll refer to the side view above, you’ll see that it’s a tall, narrow board. The processor in all these are at the top nearest the power supply fan for better cooling, and the case is a good two inches wider than a standard AT case. Referring to the back view below, the keyboard, USB and mouse ports and the serial and parallel ports are all clustered together on a panel because these are all mounted directly on the motherboard, also a characteristic of ATX.

Size of the case

Had you wondered why all of a sudden, most new PC’s are tall? If you were designing an ATX case and had to leave room above a standard ATX board for the power supply, the minimum height would be the same as this case at 17 inches. Pretty tall. But it leaves room for plenty of 5-1/4 bays – four in this case. Another feature of this case is a very quiet case fan that’s built in the front bottom.

Slots

Besides the 2 MB cache, another interesting feature of this motherboard is, first, no ISA slots! That’s right, there are six PCI slots and one AGP for the video. ISA slots have been around since the IBM PC AT a zillion years ago, and we’ve given them up at last. There’s no reason not to on a new PC because you get the best prices on sound, network and modem cards if you buy PCI boards anyway.

Hard Drive

The only thing this motherboard lacks is UDMA 66. UDMA 66 is the newest hard drive interface that will handle data bust rates of 66MB/sec from the hard drive, compared to the old standard of 33MB/sec. I did buy a 7200 RPM drive which reduces program loading by at least 20%. And I certainly believe that it makes that much difference after using it for a few weeks.

Plug-ins

The other thing about this board is that it has no built-in systems. The minimum you should expect is that it have sound on board, and the newest ones have Sound, Video, Ethernet and Modem! But this board has none of those, making it a bit more expensive. Still this board does not lack for slots, so I have a Yamaha 3D sound card and a Windows Modem on cards. There are still four slots left. You’ll need one for the RoadRunner Internet Service, and, let’s see, … video capture … DVD …. u