Damn
Sunday 25th February, 2007 23:50 Comments: 2
I was hoping I had enough spare parts to build a new computer. And I did. But I think I might have accidentally broken the motherboard at some point (either when taking it apart to salvage bits for the new system, or when building this one out of spare parts). It powers up when I press the power switch, but it doesn't go off if I hold the button down, and it doesn't power up the hard disk. Or beep when the graphics card isn't in place. Or beep at all. Well I suppose it would have been too good to be true. I'll have to see if I can find another motherboard that'll accept this rather nice Pentum D chip (as I'm pretty sure it's the motherboard at fault, I'm good at these sort of diagnostic things). The plan is to build a server, so I can eventually copy my RAID array across when I buy some new disks (and before then, perhaps set it up as a Windows Home Server box?), and then pass the system down to my dad. Maybe he'll buy the motherboard in exchange for the finished system. It's worth a try. Although he did already pay for the "spare" power supply I'm using.
Robert - Monday 26th February, 2007 13:19 It's alive! It's alive!! It turns out I needed to plug an additional power cable into the motherboard. I'd plugged the additional 4 pins into the 24 pin ATX connector, I'd even plugged a spare 12V molex connector into the socker next to the ATX connector. But it turns out it really did want me to plug that 4 pin (12V?) Pentium 4/Pentium D connector into the 8 pin hole (the last PSU had two 4 pins together to fill all 8 pins, but I didn't need to do that with my new Conroe boards, and with the other 4 pin connectors already filled, I didn't expect it to make a difference. But I plugged it in and pressed the power buttons, hoping that I wouldn't trip the power supply, and the hard disk whirled into life! I then managed to get into the BIOS (that I'd previously cleared) to set a few things, pressed F8 for the boot menu, selected the Memorex drive, and as I was wondering if Vista would let me install it onto a system with a temporary 2MB PCI graphics card, I realised that my copy of Vista was on a DVD-R and my Memorex drive as an old 24x CD-RW. So I found a spare Windows CD and I'm using that instead. It's looking good, although I don't know what the temperatures are like under full load. Not that my dad or even I need to run it at full speed under full load.
For those that care (probably none of you), the PC built from spares comprises:
Pentium 805D 2.66GHz CPU
2GB DDR2 RAM (533MHz)
Maxtor 120GB HDD
2MB ATI Mach 64 graphics card
Have you spotted the weak component? It'd be the graphics card that's about a decade old. Everything else is quite recent. Still, it's enough to boot Windows. That's the problem with this board, you really need a PCI-Express graphics card (or PCI, but most people abandoned PCI when everyone got AGP slots on their motherboards). Even a cheap £20 GeForce 6200 TurboCache (64MB) card would be better, but probably not that much better, I'd rather pay £24 for the GeForce 7100GS 128MB, or for £36 there's the GeForce 7300GS 256MB. Or I could suggest my dad buys the GeForce 7600GS 256MB, like what's in my computer at work, as it's only £60. I suspect all of the cards are more than enough for what my dad uses his PC for.
Pentium 805D 2.66GHz CPU
2GB DDR2 RAM (533MHz)
Maxtor 120GB HDD
2MB ATI Mach 64 graphics card
Have you spotted the weak component? It'd be the graphics card that's about a decade old. Everything else is quite recent. Still, it's enough to boot Windows. That's the problem with this board, you really need a PCI-Express graphics card (or PCI, but most people abandoned PCI when everyone got AGP slots on their motherboards). Even a cheap £20 GeForce 6200 TurboCache (64MB) card would be better, but probably not that much better, I'd rather pay £24 for the GeForce 7100GS 128MB, or for £36 there's the GeForce 7300GS 256MB. Or I could suggest my dad buys the GeForce 7600GS 256MB, like what's in my computer at work, as it's only £60. I suspect all of the cards are more than enough for what my dad uses his PC for.