Okay, here are my thoughts regarding my system build:
Parts used: Duron 750, Abit KT7a KT133a Motherboard, 256 Crucial PC-133 Cas2 memory, Antec KS282 Case w/300 watt PSU, Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60 gig 7200rpm ata/100 hard drive, a generic 50x cd-rom, external USB TEAC cd-rw, Lexmark Z52 printer, Umax Astra 3400 scanner, Global Win FOP32-1 heat sink, Envision 19" monitor, 1.44 meg floppy drive, Diamond Supra PCI 56k modem, Diamond Stealh III S540 32 meg PCI video card, Creative SoundBlaster Live Value sound card, 2 Sunon 80mm case fans (4-pin), 2 Sunon 80mm case fans (3-pin -- not used), Thermaltake Blue Orb heat sink (not used yet... for future video card overclocking), non-conductive cpu shim, Arctic Silver II thermal paste, conductive pen, magnifying glass, assorted ide and floppy cables.
A couple days prior to the "big set up," I unlocked my Duron's L7 bridges using the conductive pen which I picked up from Radio Shack online with the aid of the magnifying glass. The conductive pen can't really be used on its own--the tip is too wide. I unscrewed the top of the pen and just dipped a sharp toothpick into the "ink" and used that to apply. I found the ink to be pretty runny, so I took the time and used some old foil-backed labels that I had lying around to "masking tape off" the area around each bridge so if the ink spread too much it would just spread onto the taped off area. Pull the tape (or labels) off after the ink dried and voila!... the ink was just on the bridges themselves. I was suprised at how small those dang bridges were even after reading that they were.
At this time I also lapped the heat sink. The FOP32-1's bottom was pretty rough--certainly not smooth, but very "groovy." I picked up a sheet of 600 and 1000 grit sandpaper at Ace Hardware and used that to smooth off the bottom.
Yesterday was the big day. I had prepped months ahead of time reading on these boards and others A TON. I mean, I read everything I could get my hands on. This way no surprises (I hoped). I put all my components on a big table along with all the driver disks and utilities.
Opened up the Antec case and started putting in the drives. The Antec case is very nice and spacious. No sharp edges and lots of room making it easy to tie the cables up and out of the way making for nice airflow. Then I put the inflow Sunon fan into it's plastic housing.
Motherboard time... set the mobo on top of the anit-static bag and slapped the cpu into the socket -- kind of suprised at how much force the stupid locking arm on the socket took to move up and then snap back down. Then I applied Arctic Silver to the CPU. Luckily I tested out how fast it comes out of the syringe. You have to apply a bit of force and then a bunch of AS kind of spurts out. If I had tried that straight on the cpu tons of it would have gone everywhere! I squeezed a tiny amount on my finger (about half a grain of rice) and spread it evenly on the cpu. Next came the cpu shim and then I put on the heat sink fan--very nervously after hearing all the "cracked cpu" stories. Lined it up, connected the one clip and had to use a screwdriver to attach the second clip--it took A LOT of force! I was totally surprised at how much force was needed and I cringed expecting to hear a loud "CRACK!" at any time. I suppose you don't have to worry too much with a shim and as long as you're pressing straight down and not doing any twisting, still I was worried for a bit.
I then put the mobo in the case, lining up the holes and putting extra brass risers where needed. Then I put in the Sunon outflow fan and connected all the wires to their proper headers, consulting the manual the whole while. That ATX power supply cable got me worried... it took a bit of force to get it to snap into the socket and the mobo bent quite a bit. I said a quiet prayer so it wouldn't bust... and it didn't.
I had planned to put my PCI video card into PCI slot 1 and quickly found out what it means when they say "6 PCI slots (3 full size)". For some reason Abit put a capaciter in line behind slot 1, so the card couldn't be pushed into the slot without the end of it hitting the capciter. So I had to put it in another slot. Turned out this was fine--no probs or conflicts.
Crossed my fingers and powered up. I was VERY interested in hearing how loud everything was going to be. It was a bit louder than I was expecting, but the case was open. With the case closed it's obviously a LOT quieter, but it's still louder than I'd prefer. The Maxtor drive makes absolutely zero noise that I can hear above the fans--nice after having a real old Maxtor that made a gawd-awful high pitched whine. I had a problem with the floppy drive install as I mentioned in a previous post, but I'll just pick up a cheapie when they go on sale at Fry's for $5.
Went into the BIOS menu and set everything up--it went nice and easy, especially since I had a BIOS guide with suggested settings for aggressive performance. I had trouble with only one setting... I think with an aggressive cpu strength setting, but all the fast memory settings and other fast performance settings went fine.
I used the MaxBlast install disc that came with the drive to do my partitions. It went real easy--it has a nice graphical interface. I decided on three partitions--basically 30, 29 and 1 gigs for Aplications / Data / Swap. After that things slowed up a bit, because I hadn't had to format things in a while and had to look up the whole booting up off a floppy and formatting.
Got that done and started installing Windows 98se and all the assorted patches, drivers and tweaks. I had a problem early on with installing Motherboard Monitor of all things and kept getting a bunch of errors--it didn't install correctly and was really messing things up, so I had a setback and decided to reformat the C drive and re-install Windows again--I really, really want a clean system to begin with. I'll just stick with the Via Hardware Monitoring.
As I mentioned, no problem with the Creative Soundblaster card. I had heard the horror stories, but it went smoothly.
By the way, I purchased everything from Newegg, Axiontech, MicroBarn and The Cooler Guys. I highly recommend them all--no problems with any of them... of course everything has worked fine, so I haven't had to deal with returns.
I measured my performance using Sandra and here are the results (before on the PII 266 and now the the Duron 750):
CPU; Before: 714/354 After: 2074/1014
Memory; Before: 134/170 After: 385/425
So there's been a bit of a performance increase! And I haven't even set the FSB to 133 yet, I'm just running it 100mhz for now until I get everything installed--then OC'ing time!
Temps are nice too, running at 24 idle. Haven't pushed it yet to see what it does under load.
Well, that's my story. Back to installing all my goodies and enjoying my new pc!
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