NF4 LanParty - initial build w/pictures

[wevsspot]

DreamSR, I know you directed your question to Angry, but I wanted to second his recommendation of the 3700 San Diego cpu. It is an excellent processor, lots of headroom, low voltage requirements and minimum heat.

 

For memory I don't think you can go wrong with the G.Skill 2X1gb kit of PC4000 HZ's. Great stuff. But I also highly recommend OCZ memory.

[RAINMAKA]

i plan to overclock once i successfully build my computer. it wouldnt hurt to install a xp-90 in the very begging would it? i figure i should just install it now instead of having to take the motherboard out later, if that makes sense. the xp-90 should provide enough cooling right or should i get the xp-120?

[General Septem]

i plan to overclock once i successfully build my computer. it wouldnt hurt to install a xp-90 in the very begging would it? i figure i should just install it now instead of having to take the motherboard out later, if that makes sense. the xp-90 should provide enough cooling right or should i get the xp-120?

The XP-90 is sufficient. The XP-120 will cool better or at the very least it'll be quieter because of the bigger fan. But if Angry is using the XP-90 you can bet it's sufficient. Even the AMD heatsink will give you at least a slight overclock. Mine idles around 28-30 with stock HSF and stock speed.

[RAINMAKA]

i want to try and order all my parts at once and from one place, newegg in this case. well they only have the xp-90 copper and the xp-120. the copper xp-90 is like 5 dollars more which doesnt matter to me, but i want to know if the copper will wear down on my mobo too much. also which will provide more cooling?

[General Septem]

There's a reccomended list for HSFs somewhere around here. The SI-120 is on it and the copper XP-90 is not. The copper is simply too heavy unless you've got some way to brace it up.

[RAINMAKA]

yea thats what i was thinking the copper one weighs almost twice as much as the 120. i was just hoping the 120 will fit, but now that i hear the 120 is on a list of reccomended HSFs everything should be good.

[Angry_Games]

please keep this thread on topic...I don't want to have to go through 20 pages and clean it up

 

this thread is for those having troubles with their initial build or looking for tips on getting their computer up and running for the first time

[88malice]

I do not have pics yet, but these are the specs so far...

Thermaltake Armor va8000b series black case

amd antlon 64 4000+ processor

going for 2 gigs of gskill ram 3200

will take pics when the rest of my stuff arrives and i start to assemble it, this is the very first computer i'm going to build, i'v modified others as in put in video cards/ram/harddrives/powersupplys and sound cards, but i havn't built one, i didnt know this motherboard was so specific on a lot of things or i would have ordered a different one but wish me luck, cant wait to get this up and running.

[Kirby Smith]

Put together the components in my sig today after the PSU arrived. I followed the nice photo steps that started this thread, as well as Ed Jakobson's instructions. Initial testing went well. I switched to the optimized defaults as directed. Tested the first RAM bank in the outer orange slot with both the BIOS version of MEMTEST and ver. 1.4 that I had on a floppy. (Without a much better grounding in Linux, I have no way to make a ver. 3.2 copy at home, until this setup is completed.)

 

Tests were uneventful. Obviously, in the above process, I determined that the Floppy drive worked. I then tested that WD's HDD formatting floppy would work with a single drive in IDE1.

 

With these step accomplished, I tested the other bank of RAM in the outer orange slot. No problems after 3 passes.

 

Heh heh, I said to myself, so far so good. Then I put in the first tested bank into the second orange slot and ran MEMTEST86+ again. Opps. With two 1 GB banks running, I got many errors in one bit (00040000) at location 1268.0 MB. These started after pass zero. Temps were all good at this point. (36, 40, 45)

 

So I swapped the two RAM banks. Now the same error occurred at location 769.8, suggesting to me that the two banks are read in some mirror image mode.

 

I then pulled one bank out (call it the good one) and ran the other in the outer orange slot. Now the same error occurred at location 384.4 MB. I think these numbers are consistent, but without knowing how the board and/or MEMTEST define memory locations, I can't be sure.

 

The final test was to pull this RAM bank and put in the "good" one. At this writing only two passes have passed (so to speak), but there are no errors.

 

I conclude from all this that one RAM bank failed one bit during testing and that the problem does not lie with the Athlon CPU. (One bit out of a billion bytes isn't so bad, ppm wise, but without software that finds these bits and relocates code, it is one bit too many.)

 

Unless one of you sees another interpretation, or has another test in mind that should be tried, I intend to RMA the bad DIMM to OCZ.

 

kirby

[Kirby Smith]

I recall installing the USB drivers from the DFI CD. However, I see in Device Manager the following disconnect. Am I missing some driver? If so, where do I get it?

 

Thanks

 

kirby

 

[General Septem]

I have a question myself. Are there drivers out there that will support hot-swapping SATA drives?

[Warhead]

no driver is needed for hotswap!

 

@kirby smith: install the usb2 driver from gigabyte.com!

 

the drivers from dfi make the usb2.0 to usb1.1 because of an issue with xp!