The Official PC building thread!

Yeah, plus he asked for them!
Thanks for the compliment by the way.

 

creaky and sammorris,
That's so sweet LOL!!!!!

 

?

 

Sam, you ARE the man...Thanks a lot...Gotten many a great help on AfterDawn over the years...Great resource...Community help is where it's at.

I'll give it my 2nd go tonight after work and hoping things will boot up well, fingers crossed.

Just a question about BIOS and OS...Friends were suggesting to boot to BIOS first and flash BIOS with any new updates before going to OS, say with a floppy...Thoughts?

 

DDP: Yeah I did too, especially after he PMed about it, but I didn't want to discuss it much. That's behind us now.
Aspire: I'm not sure whether that'll be necessary or not. I know why you've been suggested to do it, some boards don't accept Core 2 Duos straight away they need a BIOS flash first. If they don't you'll soon find out. It may indeed be wise to get a later BIOS revision (not a Beta) on floppy disk using your current machine and flash it before you begin. I don't know whether it's necessary with the P5B or not, but it won't do any harm to try as long as it's not a beta (and in many cases even they're alright, but no guarantees...)

 

Then I'll go that route then, thanks Sam.

One other thing that came to mind.

I have a couple of older HDs that have around 100GB between the two of them...I was thinking to connect them as 3rd and 4th HDs and dumping what I REALLY want to keep onto the first 2 HDs rather than copying files onto DVD-Rs etc...What is the best way to do this with a Asus P5B (Evidently only 1 IDE slot) and the Antec P180B (Seems to hold only 2 HDs in the middle cage?

I have 2 optical drives connected in tandem to the one IDE slot on the M/B and I have plenty of SATA slots available but these older HDs are not SATA but IDE (One is a WD 75GB 7200 and the other Maxtor 25GB 7200).

 

Well this is what I did with my old drives:


Just route two serial ATA slots to the back of the PC and plug those in. Easy to set up, and cost about £35 in total, half what I originally paid for one of my 250GB drives only a year ago.
I don't use two brackets, I swap the cable over, although I do happen to have another port at the front I could use.

 

Heh heh...Sorry, I have NO idea what you just did there although that first pic with the cable looks like something that came with my Asus M/B...SERIOUS Noob with this so I got lost there with that.

 

It's an external hard disk enclosure. You put your internal hard disk in it, and put the box on your desk. It uses its own external power brick, and you plug a serial ata cable from your motherboard to a backplate (which the cable comes with), then another (that comes with the box) to the enclosure itself. Allows you to use the hard disks outside your PC at full speed, not having to use the slow USB2.

 

just a thought, is the backing plate for you heat sink on the back of the mobo?

that will be a kick arse rig, you might even give bigdk a run for his money in the bench mark scores if you oc it

with the ide drives it might be easier to get usb enclosers and run them off usb when you want to use them

 

Well yeah but you can get S-ATA enclosures for IDE drives (they're actually cheaper than S-ATA to S-ATA I think!) and USB2 is a lot slower than S-ATA despite what the figures show. A drive should max at about 60MB/s which is what USB2 is supposed to offer. Serial ATA offers the full 60MB/s, most USB2 hard disks don't get much above 20MB/s.
A backing plate is something that goes in an expansion bay at the back of the PC, over one of the PCI slots. (ones that don't have anything on them and are just there to cover the hole are blanking plates). The backplate is actually the metal plate with the set of holes to match up with the integrated ports on the motherboard, USB ports, PS/2/parallel/serial/network/sound ports etc. Cases always come with one, but why i've no idea, motherboards come with one, and that one's usually right. It'd be an impressive coincidence if the backplate with your case matched your motherboard.

 

Ahhh, lightbulb went on...Thanks Sam, a million...Much clearer to me now.

Yeah, I might be wrong because I have accumulated a pile of peripheral cables etc. but I think the SATA backplate adapter came with my Asus P5B Deluxe box and not the Antec P180B...Not sure.

Either way, I'll be giving it a go soon.

Not to disappoint, not likely to be OCing as I will likely will not be gaming outside of Freecell =)...Mainly want it for multimedia and multitasking purposes...Hoping to have a build that will last 5 years with some upgrade flexibility.

 

Yes it would have if you have one. Cases don't provide expansion bay stuff, only motherboards. You don't have to overclock mate, I must change my sig as my system is running stock at the moment. A software instability coincidentally appeared when I was OCing which I haven't resolved fully yet. If I OCed and it crashed I wouldn't know whether it was that or the overclock...

 

Getting ready to power things up as I have finished (???) connecting everything and now just going over the Manuals from Asus (M/B), Antec (P180B), Corsair (PSU) and ATI (VideoCard) before I power up.

As to the suggestion about hooking up the internal IDE HDs (2 of them) externally with a SATA HD Enclosure via a SATA 2-PORT INTERNAL TO EXTERNAL PCI BRACKET, what's the considerations to make (Apart from low cost) for the sort of SATA HD Enclosure?...There are so many out there and want to spend as little as possible obviously...Any particular brands or things I should look out for in choosing one?

 

So I powered up and got the Asus screen temporarily and then got an error that looked like this.

New CPU Installed.

Please enter Setup to configure your system.

Chassis Intruded!

Fatal Error...System Halted.


What's going on?

 

aspire180,
Have a look at your manual and see if you can disable the chassis intrusion prevention via jumpers on the mainboard.Try resetting the cmos.
Also try unplugging the seagate drive.

 

Looks like I circumvented that problem by clearing the CMOS...Into BIOS.

BTW, when flashing BIOS (Current version is 0302), do I need to go with each update of the BIOS or only with the most current one (0711)?

 

aspire180,
Usually the most current one is the best option.