Music: Summer Time Midi

Index Of Sections:

• Components
• Motherboard Information
• Gathering and Assembling the Components
• Preparing the Hard Drive for Use
• Resolving Conflicts
• Helpful Links

It took me quite some time to decide on the best mainboard for my new system. Initially, I planned to use the Abit IT5H because of its Soft Menu BIOS set up feature and Intel HX chipset. This board has always been rated as one of the top HX boards. After some further research, I decided I wanted some of the newer features the HX chipset did not have like support for SDRAM and Ultra DMA . The only Intel chipset to support these features was the TX chipset. However, unlike the HX chipset, the TX has a limitation of not being able to cache more than 64 megabytes of RAM. This means if your system has more than 64 MB of physical RAM, the chipset can't cache over the 64 MB limit and the system will actually suffer a loss in performance. Also, the TX chipset is limited to 512 KB, or half a megabyte, of L2 cache on the mainboard. I looked at reviews of many of the mainboards with the TX chipset but wasn't impressed by any of them.

One day while looking at a new article about socket 7 motherboards on Tom's Hardware Guide I found a review of the FIC PA-2007 motherboard. I did some more research on this board and found another Web site that also put this board at the top of their list. I decided on this motherboard for several reasons. First, the VIA Apollo 590VP2 chipset combines the best features of the Intel HX & TX chipsets. Second, this board comes with a built in level 2 cache of 1 MB versus half that for any board using the Intel TX chipset. Third, I was looking for speed and this mainboard is rated the fastest socket 7 board currently available.

After searching for a source for this board I ordered it from Leapfrog Lab, Inc.. They were very helpful and answered all my questions. I also ordered the SDRAM DIMM modules from them so that I was sure to get the right type for this board. They tested the board and RAM prior to shipping.

Close up view of the 4 level 2 cache modules totalling 1 MB

I used one mail order company, Leapfrog Labs Inc., and several local sources to purchase the components from. I didn't base all my buying decisions on price. Some had to be based on availability. Several of the components were either hard to find in stock or almost out of stock when I bought them. I had originally wanted to build this system around the AMD K6 233MHz CPU, but there were none available when I went to order. IBM was using the K6 CPUs in their new Aptiva line and had drained the market of the 233 MHz chip. This led to my decision to use the K6 200 MHz CPU instead of an Intel chip. All the reviews I read said the AMD K6 was faster than the Intel Pentium MMX chips. I bought most of the components locally from Sharp's Computer Center. The others I picked up from Computer City. I got a great deal on my new keyboard. It cost $20 and they offered a $20 mail-in rebate, which I used. So, my keyboard cost me 32 cents, the postage to mail in the rebate! I used one Web site to give me an idea of what the best price was for any given component before I bought anything. Price Watch was able to give me not only the best price, but also where I could find them on the World Wide Web.

Testing The Motherboard

Before installing the motherboard into the case, it should be tested. This way if there's anything wrong you don't have to go through the trouble of removing it. It's also a good idea to do this without the board attached to the case to be sure it's not grounded out by any of the little metal standoffs that are used to mount the board to the case. If the test passes and you have trouble with the board after installing, checking for a grounding problem with one of the standoffs would be one of the first things to check.

To perform the test you will need the motherboard, video card, monitor, memory modules, CPU chip, heat sink and fan, and power supply. I was sure to lay the motherboard on a nonconductive surface during this test. I installed the video card and DIMMs modules on the mainboard. The power supply gets attached to the mainboard too. Caution is needed here. Always be sure to connect the two power connectors to the board so that the black wires for each are in the middle, and next to each other. If the power supply is connected wrong, you can do serious damage to the mainboard. I connected the PC speaker wire to the mainboard so I could hear any error beeps and record them. These beeps will tell you what is wrong by how many times the beep is emitted. The CPU gets installed in the socket 7. There's only one way to insert this chip. The chip is marked at one corner and the socket 7 has one corner beveled. Line the two up and, after lifting the ZIF handle up, drop the CPU into the socket 7. Make sure it goes in straight but without any force. Then push the handle down and lock it. Before mounting the heat sink onto the CPU I applied some thermo compound to fill any air space between the CPU and heat sink. This thermo compound also helps transmit heat from the CPU to the heat sink better which aids in cooling these hotter running CPUs. This material can be found at Radio Shack and comes in a small tube. Be careful to only apply it to the top surface of the CPU and no further. If it gets on the pins of the CPU, it can cause it not to make a good connection in the socket 7.

The monitor gets connected to the video card and the cooling fan for the CPU should be connected to one of the power connectors from the power supply. There's only one way these connections will line up, so you can't make a mistake here. Once I double checked all the connections, I plugged in the cord for the power supply and the monitor. I turned on the monitor first and then the power to the computer. Never doing this before, I was a little tense. I watched the monitor with intense interest for any sign of a problem. I also listened for any beeps from the speaker that would indicate a problem. The first information I saw on the screen was about the Viper V330 video card. The next information was the normal Award BIOS setup screen. The system went to POST (power on self test) and the next thing it displayed was that it was running an AMD K6 200 MHz CPU. Then it tested the RAM. It ran through the test three times and registered that there was 64 MB present. The next thing was the search for the hard drive and keyboard. At this point the POST stopped and displayed error messages saying no hard drives or keyboard were present. This is exactly what should have happened. The motherboard passed its initial test and was ready to be mounted in the case with all the other components. One other thing I did was to feel the CPU to see if it felt hot. It wasn't even warm to the touch. I knew the heat sink and fan were doing their job at this point.

Installing the Motherboard and Expansion Cards

After testing was completed, I unplugged the monitor and power supply. Since this mainboard is in baby AT form factor, I was sure to line up the keyboard connector on the board with the hole on the back of the case. After locating the board's mounting holes with those in the case, I screwed in the little metal standoffs. These came with small fiber washers that go on the threaded part of the standoff before screwing it into the case. I used the screws provided to connect the mainboard to the standoffs being careful not to tighten down on them. They just need to be snug to avoid damage to the board.

Next the jumpers needed to be set for this motherboard. The manual that came with the PA-2007 was simple to follow and very well written. I had to set the bus speed to 66 MHz and use a clock multiplier of 3x to assure my 200 MHz CPU would run at the correct speed. There was also a jumper for setting the internal or core voltage of the CPU. All MMX CPUs are dual voltage. They have both an internal and external voltage. The correct voltage settings for my CPU are 2.9V for the internal voltage and 3.3V for the external voltage.

Next I inserted the expansion cards. The video card was a PCI bus card, so it went into one of the PCI expansion slots. The PCI slot can be recognized by its white color and shorter length than the standard ISA slots.

The sound card, modem, and SCSI adapter card for the flatbed scanner all went into the three ISA slots. When plugging in expansion cards, care should be taken to insure they are fully seated in the slot without applying too much force. The mainboard should be supported by the standoffs in this section to prevent bending it when inserting these cards.

Connecting the serial port connectors was next. Care should be taken when connecting any ribbon style cables. The cable will have some type of colored marking on one edge. This indicates which edge of the terminal connects to pin 1 on the connector. The pin 1 for all connections is marked by a white colored bar on this motherboard. On disk drives, the pin 1 designation is usually next to the power connection. Care should be taken to read and follow all manuals when it comes to making these connections. Next, I connected the parallel port connector ribbon for the printer, the floppy diskette drive ribbon connector, and the IDE ribbon connector for the hard drive. The hard drive was connected to the Primary IDE port as a master, while the CD-ROM drive was connected to the secondary IDE port also as a master.

There was a block connector for the front panel LED indicators on this board. I connected the wires for the hard drive IDE LED, KB_LOCK which allows the keyboard to access the system, reset switch lead, PW_LED which indicates when the system power is on, the PC speaker lead, and the TB_LED which indicates the system speed is in turbo speed.

Installing the Drives

I had one hard drive, two floppy disk drives, one tape drive, and one CD-ROM drive to install. The midi tower case I used had room for all of these plus one additional external 3 1/2 inch, and 5 1/4inch drive bay and one more internal 3 1/2 inch hard drive bay that could be used. I installed all of the drives in their respective bays and secured them with the screws provided with the case.

The CD-ROM drive ribbon was connected and also the audio cable that attaches to the sound card and the drive. There is only one way to connect this cable because of the way the connector is made. I also plugged in the ribbon cable to the two floppy drives, making sure I had the drive designated as the "A" drive connected with the connector closest to the "twist" in the cable. I attached the ribbon cable for the hard drive next, making sure the jumper setting on the drive was set to "master". The tape drive came with its own ribbon cable that connected to the cable for the floppy drives. Each drive was connected to a power connector from the power supply. The floppy disk drives take the small connectors while everything else uses the larger type. There's only one way these connectors will fit together so a mistake can't be made here.

The system was now ready to go. The next step in setting things up will be checking the BIOS settings and then preparing the hard disk to receive the operating system. At this point a boot disk will be needed to get the system started so the hard drive can be set up.

Mid Tower Case and Installed Components

250 Watt power supply Hard drive bay 5 1/4 inch drive bay 3 1/2 inch drive bay CPU with heat sink and fan ISA expansion slots PCI expansion slots

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Preparing the Hard Drive for Use

Preparing a Boot Disk

To start up a system with a new hard drive, a boot disk is necessary. It needs to contain the system files; Command.com, Io.sys, Msdos.sys, config.sys, and autoexec.bat. Several command files are needed too. These are xcopy.exe and xcopy32.exe, fdisk.exe, format.com, edit.com, scandisk.exe, and deltree.exe. One other very important file will be needed for the CD-ROM drive; mscdex.exe. My new version of Windows 95 came with a boot disk with all the necessary files on it. I had to add the drivers for my CD-ROM drive to the autoexec.bat and config.sys files so the system would recognize my CD-ROM drive for use before installing Windows 95. The autoexec.bat and config.sys files on the boot disk were empty. I copied the drivers from the CD-ROM driver disk to a directory I created on the boot disk. Then I added the appropriate lines to the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to load these drivers. The manual that came with my CD-ROM drive explained how to do this and was very easy to follow.

Partition and Format the Hard Drive

Rather than fill up more space describing how this is done, here is a good link that will explain these procedures to you. I found a very good explanation for how to partition and format a new drive on the PC Mechanic Web site. Scroll down the page until you get to the section that describes this. You may also find some useful information here. I divided my hard drive into two logical partitions; C, and D. Windows 95 OSR-2 comes with FAT32 but I decided not to use it for now. Since I used the older FAT16, Windows 95 wouldn't recognize more than a 2 gigabyte drive. This is why the two logical drive partitions. After formatting was complete, I was ready to install Windows 95 from the CR-ROM disk. This is where the CD-ROM drive was necessary and why it was necessary to have the drivers installed for it on the boot disk.

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Resolving Conflicts

I encountered very few problems after starting up the system. The first thing I did was to go to Windows Control Panel and click on the System icon. I opened the tab labeled Device Manager and looked for any yellow exclamation marks on any of the devices. One of the problems involved the CD-ROM drive. I only needed to change a line in the config.sys file that was loading a driver that was not needed. The main conflict I encountered was with my US Robotics Sportster 28.8 data/fax modem. There are jumpers on the modem to set the COM port and IRQ used. These were already set at COM 2 and IRQ 3 from my old system. These settings should also have been the same on the new system. However, I was getting an error message during the boot process stating there was a conflict at the 2f8 I/O address. This is the usual I/O address used by COM port 2. I couldn't find anything else using that address but also could not use COM 2 for the modem. I set the jumpers on the modem to COM 4, IRQ 3 and tried to have Windows locate my modem once again. This time it located it on COM 4 and set it up.

The only other problem I encountered was with the version of Microsoft Internet Explorer I loaded. I had been using version 3.01b on my old system without a hitch. I didn't have the installation file for this version so I had to use version 3.02 instead. I installed IE 3.02 but found it very buggy. I was having problems losing control of the mouse while going from a Web page that played background sound to another page with sound. I never really figured out exactly what was wrong but came to the conclusion the only fix was to try another version of Internet Explorer. I went ahead and downloaded IE4.0 and installed it. I wasn't crazy about the active desktop so I got rid of it. I do think the new email and news reader program, Outlook Express, is much improved over the older Microsoft Mail and News. I haven't had a minutes trouble since upgrading to IE4.0. Actually I'm glad I did it now. I've ordered the new Win Bench98 to run some benchmarks on this system. I want to see how it stacks up to other 200 MHz systems.

The one component in this system that made a huge impact on me was the Sound Blaster AWE 64 PNP sound card. My other system had been using a Sound Blaster Pro card and didn't have true Wave synthesis. The difference the AWE 64 makes while listening to MIDI files is tremendous. While playing MIDI files I'd heard many times before I was able to hear new instruments and sounds I'd never heard before. It's like listening to a song on an AM radio station and then on a state of the art home stereo system.

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Helpful Links

Here is a list of links on the Web that I used to help with the buying decisions and building of this new system.

• Tom's Hardware Guide
• Tweak It
• Price Watch
• Computer Craft
• PC Mechanic
• American Micro Device (AMD) K6 MMX
• Award BIOS Home Page
• VIA Technologies Inc
• FIC Home Page
• IBM Home Page
• PC Computing Magazine

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