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)