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Building an Engineering Workstation - Composite Materials - Date: 01/22/00
Building an
Engineering Workstation > Page 1,
2, 3,
4, 5, 6
System Summary
To summarize, here's the system I ended up with:
Pentium III 500 MHz and Soyo SY6BA+IV motherboard bundle, $377
from TC Computers
InWin Q500 Case, $85 from Page Computer
Maxtor 27.2 GB EIDE UltraDMA/66 7200 RPM 2 MB Cache, $207 from
Buy.com
250 MB Internal Zip drive, $148 from Page Computer
Memorex 48X CDROM, $47 from Buy.com
Teac 1.44 MB, $17 from Page Computer
Oxygen VX1, $191 from Page Computer
Viewsonic PS790 19 inch short depth, $399 from Buy.com
Diamond SupraExpress 56K V.90 ISA, $63 from Buy.com
Sound Blaster 16 PCI, $37 from Buy.com
Logitech Cordless Wheel Mouse, $40 from Buy.com
Logitech Cordless ITouch, $45 from Buy.com
With shipping, my total came to $1697.37. If I had had to purchase
RAM, the total would have been $2135.35, right about my budgeted price. I
didn't price a comparable prebuilt system, but this was a few hundred
dollars lower than the systems I was originally looking at. A direct
comparison is difficult, because those systems had some extras (like
DVD), but lacked other components (smaller hard drives, no Zip disks,
etc.).
Vendors and Shipping
As you may have noticed, all of my purchases were mail order. I
considered purchasing locally, mainly for service and returns, but
prices were anywhere from 20% to 50% higher on each component. Even
with shipping costs, I came out way ahead.
To minimize the hassles of tracking multiple orders, I originally
planned to buy all of my components from one vendor. Since I wanted to
buy the CPU and motherboard from TC Computers, I priced out the
entire system from TC. Buy.com's
prices are so low, though, that I saved something like $200 by using
them for most of the components.
The graphics card is what forced me to a third vendor. Professional
cards are harder to find than gaming cards, and very few places
carried the Oxygen line. Page
Computer had close to the best price on the VX1, and they had it
in stock. They also beat TC Computers on the case, and even managed to
beat Buy.com on the Zip drive.
Shipping overall went smoothly. Buy.com shipped most components the
same day of the order. Page Computer didn't ship for a few days, but
they charged my credit card immediately.
The motherboard was on back order, so TC wasn't able to ship until
the 28th of December. Because it needed to ship before the end of the
year, they had to send it out without testing. I actually asked them
to charge my credit card and ship later, but they refused to do
so. However, they did give me a free upgrade to overnight shipping.
I placed my order on a Thursday, and everything except the mouse
had arrived by the following Thursday. Fortunately, I had an extra
PS/2 mouse for my laptop, so I was able to assemble the system over
the weekend.
The biggest shipping snag was with UPS. Buy.com sent their shipment
with signature required. It had snowed the day before the shipment
arrived, and the UPS driver didn't come up the driveway (it is rather
steep, but the FedEx driver had no trouble).
The problem is that the driver said no one was home to sign for the
shipment. I figured the same thing would happen the next day, so I
called UPS and arranged to pick up the packages at the station. When I
got there, though (it's about a two hour round trip), they had sent
the packages out for another delivery attempt.
Needless to say, I wasn't very happy. After a few phone calls, I
finally reached the Albuquerque manager, who contacted the driver to
insure the packages would actually be delivered. This time, they
were.
I also ran into a problem with the motherboard, which required me
to return it (more on that in the Assembly section). I originally
brought it to Mail Boxes Etc., and they charged me $51 for UPS 2nd Day
Air. The shipping calculator on the UPS Web site, though, came up with
$28. I called the MBE national office, and they said their markup is
anywhere from 100% to 300%. They tried to justify it as added value,
but I did the packaging myself, and the UPS office was only another 10
or 15 minuted from MBE.
I ended up taking the package one block down from MBE to the post
office. Priority Mail, with insurance and tracking, was only
$8.50. Second day delivery isn't guaranteed, but for $42 I can afford
to wait an extra day if necessary.
Assembly
With all the parts in hand, it was time to assemble the
system. I've built two machines at work, so I was expecting this to
take less than a day (including loading of the OS, but not other
software).
Physical Assembly
The physical assembly was fairly smooth. Almost as soon as I
started, I realized I had left my antistatic wrist strap at the
office. I was just starting to wonder why motherboard manufacturers
don't include one (they're not that expensive), when I opened the
graphics card box and found a disposable wrist strap.
I encountered a few minor problems, mostly related to the size of
the case. The floppy drive is at the top of the case, and the floppy
cable could barely reach. I put the CDROM and Zip drives right below
the floppy. Although the IDE cable reached the drives, I had to lower
the Zip drive by one bay to get the middle connector in place.
Other than that, the case was easy to work with. As with all ATX
cases, the motherboard fits on a removable bulkhead, so it can be
installed outside the case. The sides and the top each come off
independently. Once the whole thing is assembled, all you have to do
is remove two screws, slide one side back (there's a grip for that),
and rotate it out. Putting it back together is just as easy.
OS Installation
Installing NT was a little more difficult than I expected. First,
the NT installer can't format a hard
disk partition larger than 2 GB. I wanted three roughly equal
partitions. I had another working NT machine handy, so I temporarily
installed the drive as a slave and formatted it using the NT Disk
Administrator (being careful to keep the boot partition under 7.8
GB).
Next, I had to flash the motherboard BIOS. With
four IDE channels, the two UDMA/66 channels are treated as SCSI
devices. A bug in the BIOS prevented the system from booting off of
the SCSI devices. An update was available,
but I only discovered the problem after reading postings on Usenet
(and after trying to get the system to boot for half a day). The BIOS
update was dated early October; I'm surprised my board wasn't updated,
because it shipped in late December.
Anyway, in addition to flashing the BIOS, I also had to download
the NT SP4 ATAPI update (required for NT to see the larger drive), and
I had to download the current Highpoint UDMA drivers. When
installing NT, I chose to specify my storage devices (rather than
having NT detect them), and used the ATAPI and Highpoint disks.
The system now booted to NT. I updated to SP3 from a CD, installed
the Zip drivers, then updated to SP6a from a Zip disk. At this point,
installing the other drivers (graphics, modem, sound, mouse, keyboard)
was easy, though I did have to work out a few IRQ conflicts.
Motherboard Problems
During the entire installation, the system was acting
strangely. The reset button wouldn't work, and I had to fully power
down before rebooting. The system would also lock up at various times
during the NT loading process. Occasionally, it would also lock up
while running a program or transfering a large file.
I tried reseating the CPU, DIMMs, BIOS, and all of the cards. I
tried various BIOS and graphics settings. Nothing seemed to work. I
finally pulled out all of the DIMMs except one in the first slot. It
worked! I then tried each DIMM one at a time in that slot. Each time,
the system worked just fine.
I then tried a DIMM in each of the first and second slots. This
time, the system crashed with a general protection fault as soon as NT
started to load. I tried a few other DIMM and slot combinations, and I
was able to confirm the problem was a bad DIMM slot.
I called TC Computers tech support. After a half hour wait on hold
(at least it was toll free), the technician immediately agreed with my
assessment and gave me an RMA number. As soon as they receive the
board, they will send me a new one by FedEx second day delivery.
If I had been able to wait a few more days on the initial delivery,
TC would have been able to test the board before shipping it, and I
probably would have avoided this problem. However, I did get
everything working before shipping out the motherboard, so all I have
to do is reassemble the system when the new board arrives and I'll be
ready to go.
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