Making of a Modder
Several years ago, with the encouragement and help of friends, I built a PC from component parts for the first time. The fastest processor at that time was outside of my budget, so I bought the notorious Celeron 300A — loved by many for its ability to be dramatically overclocked. To make the feat even easier, I coupled it with one of the first “jumperless” motherboards. I was trying to avoid junky parts and high prices from PC manufacturers, and maybe learn something about this mysterious hardware.
Fast forward to today, where a vibrant market now caters to overclockers, modders, and LAN party gamers. In the age of the iMac, style matters as much as performance. Seeing mostly flashy, glowing, see-through cases littering online stores, I decided they were gaudy, and I set out to build a vanilla PC with conservative components. But something unintended and unexplainable happened along the way.
Keep reading for highlights, photos, and the parts list.
Like I said, I dunno what got into me, so without further delay … Allow me to present my new machine, happily running Linux Fedora Core 2. I’ve included the parts list below, but let me highlight some features.
- First, I wanted reasonable performance, and the Athlon delivers raw power while SATA provides fast disk access. I’m always impressed with the stability and performance of motherboards from ABIT.
- Second, cooling is important as heat is the biggest reason for component failure. I have a 120 millimeter intake fan cooling the harddisk, and another one for the exhaust near the processor. I used Artic Silver compound and a Thermaltake Silent Boost fan to bring down the CPU core temperature. To help with air flow, I used rounded cables where ribbon cables are usually found.
- I wanted a silence! Every fan (including the one in the power supply) was chosen for a balance of performance and decibel rating. All the fans are rated at 21 dBA and lower, which is a equivalent to someone whispering from 6 feet away. I replaced the Northbridge fan with a heatsink. The harddisk from Seagate uses fluid dynamic bearings that give it lower noise.
- Design and style makes us enjoy everyday things. I chose a case with a gorgeous brushed aluminum face. I didn’t use a camera flash or play light tricks with the photos — the case really glimmers like that! Of course, the fans have matching blue LEDs that show through the case window. I used metallic silver spray paint on the DVD and floppy to match the case.
- The centerpiece is the fan controller that takes up two bays with its circular glowing LCD. It can glow red, blue, or violet, depending on my mood. It monitors the fan RPM and temperature of the video card, case, harddisk, and CPU. For added fun, it controls the system sound volume and indicates the room noise level. Even with quiet fans, I use the controller to set the RPM levels of the fans so things get really quiet while remaining cool.
I split up my order between Mwave and Newegg, choosing to buy from whomever listed the cheaper price. While MWave has been my trusted partner in the past, I must say that Newegg really rocks. The ability to find things on their site, view pictures, search on specs, and read customer comments makes it a superior website alone. The order process is very automated and streamlined, sending e-mails during each step to keep you updated, and shipping things very quickly.
Parts List:
benq 19″ lcd fp951
silverstone tj02 (silver) mid tower
abit kv7 motherboard
amd xp 2800+
512M DDR400
aopen geforce mx4000-dv128mb ddr 8xagp w/tv/dvi
hd 200gb sata seagate 7200
sony dwd-18a 8x dvd double layer 8.5gb dual rewritable drive
usb reader enlight 6-in-1
power ahanix silenx 400w
gatewatch aerocool
coolermaster 120mm sleeve fans (2)
thermaltake silentboost
zalman northbridge heatsink
artic silver
ortek mck-91 mini keyboard
mouse logitech mx 310
cable hd ide 18″ round blue
cable floppy 18″ round blue
jbl creature ii speakers
linksys wireless-g wrt54g 802.11g
October 31st, 2004 at 9:23 pm
Nice! Since I’m again a proud member of the Apple Cult, I’m very curious as to what the heck that one large slot is on the front of your computer? It’s right below the memory card slot reader … I’ve seen those before. Does it take in mini-hard drives with capacities in the hundreds of gigabytes? With a slot that large, it was to use some kind of digital storage that blows everything else away! Seriously!
Et tu, Eric? Let me help you get your hands on the finest Unix machine ever built. You’ll never feel better until you become one of us.
November 1st, 2004 at 10:31 am
Ok, you got me.
I grappled with whether to put a floppy drive in or not. I could easily boot from flash or cd-rom, right? I added the drive for backwards compatibility and cheap insurance based on bad luck I’ve had. I once owned a G3 iMac, and one day I bought software for MacOS. The included media was a floppy disk that I could do nothing with. Another time, I decided USB was the superior serial bus and I switched everything to it, including my keyboard. Then I ran into instances when the keyboard wouldn’t work, like certain rescue disks. So, while new technology is great, having stuff that works all the time is nice too.
I would love to have an iBook. I just met with a friend last weekend who showed off his G5 iBook, and it was impressive. The purist in me wishes that more Apple code was open-source, and that the APSL was compatible with the GPL.
March 3rd, 2005 at 9:34 am
Why didn’t you go the AMD 64 route? 64-bit linux sounds fun for no other reason than you can do it.
March 17th, 2005 at 10:57 pm
I remember thinking they were too new and too expensive! Now, AMD’s 64-bit chip is very dominant, and the ATHLON 64 2800+ is going for $125. Unbelievable. It’s time to upgrade already!
I once tried running Linux on PPC and SPARC machines, and I always ran into problems because I had to recompile the source for everything that wasn’t packaged with the distro. And some things, like browser plug-ins, are often in binary form only.
I think it would be easier switching architectures with AMD64 however. I’ve read that distros for x86_64 like Fedora have two sets of libraries installed (called “biarch”) for compatibility with 32-bit x86. Even with compatibility, there are some seams — like, plug-ins can’t be mixed, so you can’t use 32-bit plug-ins in a 64-bit Mozilla. I guess you might be tempted to just use 32-bit Mozilla.
From a standpoint of performance, AMD64 isn’t that much better, and I probably wouldn’t notice it. Integer performance is 35% better, but other benchmarks are nearly the same. In a real world test, it would take 26 seconds to gzip a big file on 32-bit and 22 seconds on 64-bit. Only on big CPU tasks, would it be noticeable. So, my next CPU will probably be AMD64, but I’ll wait until upgrading gives me a leap in performance for middle-of-the-road price.
March 29th, 2005 at 9:04 am
What’s up?
You know, I recently built a new shuttle (SFF) PC and during the process caught myself isntalling my 3 year old FDD.
Thank god I caught myself before it was too late and removed it.
Sorry you weren’t caught in time, Eric.