I thought I'd post how my new computer build went over the weekend.
The Gigabyte motherboard was something new for me. I've built a lot of systems in the past, but I tend to go with ASUS boards as they have given me the fewest, i.e. zero, problems. I wanted to try something different this time and I liked the dual BIOS and the 6-phase power (even though I'll admit, it may have very little effect on stability).
Gigabyte GA-G8NXP-SLI
Athlon64 4000+
1GB PC4000, Crucial Ballistix
XFX GeForce 6800GT PCI-e (yeah, I know, lots of anandtech forum users don't like XFX, but I've used them before)
Zalman 7700-cu HSF
1 Seagate Barracuda 120GB SATA drive
2 WD Raptor 74GB SATA drives (Raid 0)
The first challenge was getting the factory installed bracket that surrounds the CPU socket off of the motherboard. This was easier than I thought, but you never know with these things and it's never fun to have to begin applying too much force to anything on the motherboard.
There are two little plastic pins on each side of the bracket that you can slide a small flat screwdriver into and pull out, this allows you squeeze the bottom of the pin and pull it out of the board. The bracket comes off and the back plate also come off. This is important because the Zalman comes with it's own backplate. The rest of the HSF install is easy, the steel nipples screw into the backplate, add some thermal compound to the CPU (I used Nanotherm PCM+ this time around), mount the HSF and just screw the brackets into the nipples. Easy. For the last couple of years, I've been getting HSFs that are bolt on rather than clip on. The spring clips are usually so tight you run the risk of breaking something on the board during installation.
The Gigabyte K8DPS (dual power system) daughter card was a minor problem. First, the fan on the card points into the board, but luckily fits between the fins of the Zalman HSF. A perfectionist might not like that arrangement, but the card fit and it doesn't seem to impact the heatsink all that much. What was more of a concern is that a capacitor on the daughter card and one on the motherboard were positioned such that they touch and that seems like a design flaw to me.
The rest of the install was easy, no problems were encountered. Booting up, now that was trickier.
You'd like to think that with 3 SATA drives and 4 SATA headers you'd have no problems right? Well, Gigabyte doesn't really document the BIOS functions, just sort of labels them. By default, the board would not recognize or detect any of the installed drives. The windows installer could see drives and any partitions they had, but the board didn't see them, wouldn't boot to them or include them in the boot priority list.
Trial and error - welcome to the Integrated Peripherals part of the BIOS.
The areas of importance here are the Serial-ATA 1 and Serial-ATA 2 sections. By default, both are enabled as are their sub-sections Priamary and Secondary Raid. However, by default, no SATA drives are detected. I read of people making JBOD arrays of single disks to get them detected. Not necessary.
Maybe there's a method here, but I couldn't find one. I had the Seagate drive connected to SATA 0, and the 2 WD drives connected to SATA 1 and SATA 2, but I could change around the primary and secondary raid settings in the BIOS and see drives show up on Channel 2, 3, 4, or 5. I finally found a setting that detected only the Seagate drive on Channel 2. Now I see that drive on boot up and the other 2 are detected in the RAID configuration. I then set up the WD drives in a RAID 0. Now both the single drive and the RAID 0 appear in the boot priority list. Windows installation can commence.
The only real problem I had after installing windows is that the nVidia nForce drivers did something odd. The first driver was installed, the computer rebooted automatically, and then my DVD-Rom drive stopped detecting the media that was in it. After trying various other CDs and not resolving anything, I went ahead and did all the windows updates and eventually the DVD drive came back. After that I was able to install all the other nVidia drivers, the Raid was then detected and I was pretty much done.
Everything running beautifully. 3DMark05 scores in the 4500 range, 3DMark03 Scores in the 11500 range. Running Prime95 now for burn in.
Images can be viewed here:
http://www.goldencompass.org/gallery/compbuilds
The Gigabyte motherboard was something new for me. I've built a lot of systems in the past, but I tend to go with ASUS boards as they have given me the fewest, i.e. zero, problems. I wanted to try something different this time and I liked the dual BIOS and the 6-phase power (even though I'll admit, it may have very little effect on stability).
Gigabyte GA-G8NXP-SLI
Athlon64 4000+
1GB PC4000, Crucial Ballistix
XFX GeForce 6800GT PCI-e (yeah, I know, lots of anandtech forum users don't like XFX, but I've used them before)
Zalman 7700-cu HSF
1 Seagate Barracuda 120GB SATA drive
2 WD Raptor 74GB SATA drives (Raid 0)
The first challenge was getting the factory installed bracket that surrounds the CPU socket off of the motherboard. This was easier than I thought, but you never know with these things and it's never fun to have to begin applying too much force to anything on the motherboard.
There are two little plastic pins on each side of the bracket that you can slide a small flat screwdriver into and pull out, this allows you squeeze the bottom of the pin and pull it out of the board. The bracket comes off and the back plate also come off. This is important because the Zalman comes with it's own backplate. The rest of the HSF install is easy, the steel nipples screw into the backplate, add some thermal compound to the CPU (I used Nanotherm PCM+ this time around), mount the HSF and just screw the brackets into the nipples. Easy. For the last couple of years, I've been getting HSFs that are bolt on rather than clip on. The spring clips are usually so tight you run the risk of breaking something on the board during installation.
The Gigabyte K8DPS (dual power system) daughter card was a minor problem. First, the fan on the card points into the board, but luckily fits between the fins of the Zalman HSF. A perfectionist might not like that arrangement, but the card fit and it doesn't seem to impact the heatsink all that much. What was more of a concern is that a capacitor on the daughter card and one on the motherboard were positioned such that they touch and that seems like a design flaw to me.
The rest of the install was easy, no problems were encountered. Booting up, now that was trickier.
You'd like to think that with 3 SATA drives and 4 SATA headers you'd have no problems right? Well, Gigabyte doesn't really document the BIOS functions, just sort of labels them. By default, the board would not recognize or detect any of the installed drives. The windows installer could see drives and any partitions they had, but the board didn't see them, wouldn't boot to them or include them in the boot priority list.
Trial and error - welcome to the Integrated Peripherals part of the BIOS.
The areas of importance here are the Serial-ATA 1 and Serial-ATA 2 sections. By default, both are enabled as are their sub-sections Priamary and Secondary Raid. However, by default, no SATA drives are detected. I read of people making JBOD arrays of single disks to get them detected. Not necessary.
Maybe there's a method here, but I couldn't find one. I had the Seagate drive connected to SATA 0, and the 2 WD drives connected to SATA 1 and SATA 2, but I could change around the primary and secondary raid settings in the BIOS and see drives show up on Channel 2, 3, 4, or 5. I finally found a setting that detected only the Seagate drive on Channel 2. Now I see that drive on boot up and the other 2 are detected in the RAID configuration. I then set up the WD drives in a RAID 0. Now both the single drive and the RAID 0 appear in the boot priority list. Windows installation can commence.
The only real problem I had after installing windows is that the nVidia nForce drivers did something odd. The first driver was installed, the computer rebooted automatically, and then my DVD-Rom drive stopped detecting the media that was in it. After trying various other CDs and not resolving anything, I went ahead and did all the windows updates and eventually the DVD drive came back. After that I was able to install all the other nVidia drivers, the Raid was then detected and I was pretty much done.
Everything running beautifully. 3DMark05 scores in the 4500 range, 3DMark03 Scores in the 11500 range. Running Prime95 now for burn in.
Images can be viewed here:
http://www.goldencompass.org/gallery/compbuilds
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