Undertaking another exciting weekend hardware adventure

Undertaking another exciting weekend hardware adventure

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): If you think your PC is too slow, you're a
normal person. Trust me, you are. I say so because I think most
normal people believe that they always need a more powerful PC
with a bigger hard disk, more memory and, if there is still some
cash left in their savings account, a larger monitor.

Now that I have said this, I can also include myself into the
group of normal people, because for the past two years I have
wanted a faster PC.

Frankly, there was nothing wrong with my AMD 233MHz Compaq
Presario. I had replaced the original 2.4 GB Seagate hard disk
with a larger and faster 8,5 GB IBM hard disk, and I still had
around 30 percent of free space on it. But, as my workload grew
and I had to switch from one application to another to copy and
paste text very frequently, I found that, accumulatively, I had
to waste quite a lot of time waiting for the background
application to fully become available on the screen. Besides,
there were other new technologies that I wanted to start
exploring in depth, including voice recognition and Web
development. The AMD 233 MHz machine simply didn't have enough
horsepower to drive these applications effectively.

With these objectives in mind, I joined the crowd of normal
people and started dreaming of a really powerful PC. Thus, when a
colleague expressed his interest in buying my Compaq Presario, I
immediately said "Yes!"

From parts

This time around, I wanted to once again assemble the PC. It
would be cheaper, and it would also give me a good opportunity to
catch up with the best technologies and products available in the
market today. There is a lot of choice in Mal Mangga Dua and
Gajah Mada Plaza, of course, as our computer market seems to have
regained most of its vitality prior to the May 1998 riots.

However, based on personal preference, I chose to go with
products from ASUSTeK, one of the most popular brands from
Taiwan.

The problem with ASUS motherboards is that, because they are
so popular, a lot of counterfeited products are also circulating.
To make sure that I would get an original product, I went to
ASUSTeK's sole distributor for Indonesia, Astrindo. I was very
lucky to met Alfredo Hui, the company's director, who graciously
spent almost two hours showing me his latest products and
explaining their features.

Alfredo also informed me that original ASUS products were
available at ASUS dealers. The boxes have an Astrindo sticker on
them and, more importantly, every original ASUS product should
come with a warranty card from his company.

I finally decided on one of the newest ASUS motherboards, the
mid-range ASUS CUSL2. This jumperfree motherboard has the latest
Intel chipset, the 815E, which offers several benefits. First of
all, the chipset already has an AGP graphics card built-in, but
the user can add a third party graphics card for better
performance.

It suited me very well, as I am also planning to buy an LCD
monitor as soon as I have saved enough money and the price has
come down a little bit more. LCD monitors work best with digital
graphics card, and the i815E chipset will allow me to add the
necessary card later on without having to invest in an analog
graphics card now. For now, the built-in AGP, which shares the
SDRAM for memory, will be more than sufficient as I do not play
3-D games at all.

The motherboard itself has won a lot of accolades for its
speed and features. It supports up to seven USB ports, three
SDRAM modules for a maximum capacity of 512 MB, UltraDMA/100, 133
MHz Front Side Bus, two communication and network risers that are
patented by ASUSTeK, six PCI slots, power-on through the keyboard
or mouse, suspend to RAM, wake-on-ring, etc. If you'd like a more
in-depth review, just go to www.planethardware.com (it is a great
site for those who want to get technical).

When powered up for the first time, the BIOS detected the
internal clock speed of the processor and asked me to confirm it.
Those who like to run the PC faster than the speed specified by
Intel -- a tweaking known as "overclocking" -- are bound to love
this motherboard tremendously. They can switch it from jumperless
to jumper-based, and by setting up the right DIP switches they
can overclock the processor.

Overclocking will cause the processor to become hotter and
the system unstable. However, ASUS includes a utility called PC
Probe that will keep track of the temperature of the processor
and the motherboard. I have not tried overclocking the processor,
so the temperatures of these two key components have always been
below the default thresholds -- even hours after I turned off the
air conditioner in the room.

The motherboard takes the new Intel Pentium III Coppermine
processor with the FCPGA 370 slot as well as Celeron processor
with PPGA. It supports Pentium III clock speeds of up to 933 MHz
or Celeron up to 566 MHz. Alfredo recommended the Pentium 733 MHz
because of its favorable price point at this time. Actually, any
speed above 600 MHz would be acceptable for me. I added 128 MB of
SDRAM, made by SpecTek. For the CD-ROM drive, I chose the ASUS
S500 with 50x maximum speed. It gave me enough speed to rip my CD
tracks to be stored on the Creative Nomad Jukebox that I reviewed
two weeks ago.

I also bought a 30 GB IBM hard disk and an internal Prolink
1456 PCI modem. I could not get the casing that I wanted, though.
I was very interested in Elan Vital casing, but it was not
available. So I just bought an Rp 195,000 Taiwan-made casing for
a temporary housing while waiting for the far better casing to
become available.

Back home, as you can guess, I didn't waste any time. I put
everything together, and they worked the first time I powered the
system up. The impact of the high-speed CD-ROM drive was really
impressive. Installing Windows 98, for example, took less than 15
minutes.

The real speed became really noticeable after I installed the
driver for the i815E chipset, which was included in the CD-ROM
that came with the motherboard. The only drawback was that this
motherboard did not support the old ISA add-on card, so I could
not use the spare SoundBlaster 16 sound card that had been
sitting for years in my drawer.

Problems

The first problem I encountered had to do with the modem.
Windows warned me that there was a PCI communication device that
did not have the proper driver. Luckily I still had the Presario
on my desktop, so I went to Prolink's Web site and download the
updated driver.

When I installed the driver, Windows 98 also told me that it
was not the right driver for the hardware. I went ahead and
completed the installation anyway. After the system rebooted, the
modem worked flawlessly. So, as usual, if you have a problem with
a piece of hardware, don't wait. Go straight to the
manufacturer's web site and download the latest version of the
driver. Also, even if Windows 98 says it's not the right driver,
just take the risk.

The following day I went to Gajah Mada Plaza and bought a
SoundBlaster Live! Value sound card. It was a very impressive and
very rich, with features such as four-speakers output, mixer and
musical instrument simulations. Unfortunately, right after I
installed the hardware, Windows crashed and crashed again and
there was no sound from the speakers. I called the store where I
had bought it.

They immediately gave me the answer: "You'll have to download
the new driver from the Creative website, as the one that you
have will not work with an Intel Coppermine processor." Boy, how
would I know that the processor could reject the sound card? The
driver was huge -- more than 4 MB. It took me three hours to
download it. But it was worth all the trouble. Once I finished
installing the new driver, the sound card worked without a
glitch.

So, as I put together this system, I once again learned the
importance of having the phone number of the store I bought the
components from. Those people have an amazing amount of knowledge
on the products that they sell. So, if you find yourself
scratching your head too long trying to fix a memory conflict,
don't waste your time. Just give them a call. They'll help you in
just a few minutes.

By the way, the new PC, which I am using at this very moment,
makes my work far more enjoyable. Perhaps that is the reason this
article is longer than usual. (zatni@cbn.net.id)