Hi, this is my first post here. Looks good; I hope to be around a lot in the future!

I'm looking to build a new computer, which I've never done before, so I have a few questions:

First, I want to start with 512 MB RAM. That's double what my current system has, but I want to be able to upgrade in the future if necessary. I've heard that memory has to be used at least two pieces at a time. So, am I correct in assuming I couldn't just buy a 512MB piece of memory and use it by itself for now?

Second, it's been recommended that I should update the BIOS and motherboard drivers with up-to-date versions from the Gigabyte website (I'm using a Gigabyte mobo). But, I really don't know how or when to update the drivers. Is it done somehow before Windows is installed, or afterward?

Also, the Gigabyte motherboard I'm buying apparently comes with raid drivers. I only have one hard drive and I don't expect to get a second one any time soon. Most of my work is done from a networked computer which has a raid system anyway, so I really don't need raid capabilities in the forseeable future. Should I install the raid drivers, or just let it go for now?

Finally, I've never built a computer before. I know I can put the parts together, and I know I can install the operating system (Windows 2000 Pro). But, don't I have to set the BIOS or CMOS or something, boot order, etc., before the OS is installed? If so, what are these steps, what are recommended settings, etc.?

Any help on this will be greatly appreciated. I'm excited to be building my own system, but just a little confused in a few areas.

<edit> For everyone reading this thread who wants a new computer, I can heartily recommend the following parts and the advice below. I'm very satisfied with my new system, spent about $580 on it total, and I'm sure it's much better than a system costing twice as much from Dell or the other "big box" vendors. Anyway, here's what I used:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 nForce2 Ultra 400 Athlon(XP)/Duron SktA DDR ATX Motherboard w/Audio, Gigabit LAN, IDE RAID, Serial ATA Retail

Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2600+ 1.91GHz 333FSB 512KB Processor Retail

Memory: Corsair VS256MB400C3 256MB DDR400 PC3200 CAS3 Value Select Memory Retail (Used two of these, one in the first slot in Channel A and the other in the first slot of Channel B.)

Hard Drive: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y080MO 80GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer

Video Card: Sapphire Radeon VE-7000 AGP 4X 32MB DDR Video Card w/DVI Powered by ATI

CD-ROM: Artec ACD 56X ATAPI CD-ROM Drive

CD-RW: Don't remember exactly what kind this is, got it about a year ago free after rebate.

Case: Antec Solution Series SLK3700AMB with 350-watt power supply included, bought extra 120-mm fan for front-mount.

</edit>

Thanks,

Matthew

< Edited by MatthewHSE :: Jul 28, 04, 11:47 >
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Hi MathewHSE, good to have you here, thanks for checking it out, we hope to have you here too.



[Note: this system is based on the recommendations found in the advice on computer hardware thread.]
I assume you're talking about the Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2, that's a dual channel ddr motherboard, has the option to run the DDR in dual mode. This means that



To make a long story short: yes, you can do what you want, get a single stick of the very fastest DDR the board supports, don't go for the slower speed to save a few dollars, ddr is one of the places where more speed is very noticeable. In this case DDR 400 would be pc3200 ddr. I have used and can enthusiastically recommend crucial memory, that link will take you to the ddr page for the motherboard in question. If you buy from these guys you will know that when you want to activate the dual channel ddr in the future with the second stick of 512 mB ddr, it will match exactly [as with raid, it's critical to use EXACTLY the same DDR, same company, same model number etc when creating a dual channel memory layout.

Note: DO NOT USE CHEAP NO NAME SALE BRAND MEMORY. It doesn't work, it's not worth the $40 you think you saved. Crucial works well with gigabyte boards, I've not had a problem with it. Crucial is the online distributor for Micron, one of the top 3-5 memory companies, samsung, kingston, and corsair being the others. Corsair and samsung tend to be a bit more expensive, kingston a bit less, crucial is a nice balance.



This is one thing that makes that gigabyte mobo so fantastic, if you've never lived through doing a mobo bios flash update, which always involves a moment of absolute prayer, since if you mess up, the board is toast, you won't appreciate this feature of the gigabyte boards as much.



In other words, do all the updates to the mobo drivers after installing windows, then activate the @Bios software, which runs out of windows as a standard application, it wil require network access of course to download the new bios.



You will want to download all the new drivers before getting started, you can get them here

If you have never done a raid installation on windows, you need to make the floppies for the raid, both SATA and IDE, before you start the windows installation, the gigabyte board has excellent documentation booklets that tell you how to do that. Whatever you do, you will need the serial ATA drivers, if you don't use SATA for the primary harddrive, you're losing a huge amount of speed, and windows doesn't have those drivers natively whether you go in raid mode or standard one harddrive mode.

When you start the windows installation, there is a point where it says 'hit F6 to install 3rd party raid drivers' or something like that. Hit F6, then the installation goes on for a while, then it asks for the driver floppy disks, insert the sata ones, let it do its thing, then it asks if you have more, insert the second set, for raid ide, then it asks if you have more, click no then continue.

the startup with raid does not take very long, this mobo/processor is so fast it makes almost no difference in startup time, so don't worry about that part of it.

I would definitely install the ide raid drivers too, even if you aren't currently going to run ide raid, you can switch the stuff around using the raid utility that comes with the raid installation. You can't really install this stuff on windows very safely after your OS is installed. By the way, Windows 2000 is a really good choice for this, I've done a bunch of those installs and it works really well.



Again, the Gigabyte documentation is very good, by far the hardest thing to do when setting up your own mobo/case is hooking up all those damned little usb/firewire cables, it's a royal pain.

Major hints: be very very careful with static electricity. When I do this stuff I try to work at a table with metal legs, take my shoes and socks off, touch my feet to the table, make sure I'm nowhere near carpetting. You can buy a grounding strap but I've never had a problem, but I'm very careful.

NEVER touch the contacts of any component, ddr, processor, etc, always hold it by the edges, between thumb and finger. Failure to do this can result in a toasted component. Read the directions, they are very good, amd has good directions, gigabyte has good directions, and antec has pretty good directions.



Building your own system always results in a superior machine, especiially when you do all the driver and bios updates.

The BIOS will need to be configured, feel free to ask about any things you don't understand about that.

You know the bios is more or less right when the amd processor is correctly identified, it doesn't default to correct id, requires system bus speed to be set, stuff like that, memory speed, processor speed. Avoid tempation, don't overclock, it's not worth it, although you can, very easily, with this mobo.
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I decided to buy two 256MB sticks because from my understanding of this issue, two pieces of memory working together provide better performance than a single piece of the same total capacity. I'm going to be building two more of these machines in the coming months, only the next two will have much lower demands placed on them. So if I want to, I can pull out my two 256 pieces, put one in each of the other machines, and buy two 512's for myself at that time.


Okay, I can handle that. No special difficulties with updating the drivers I guess?


So I just grab and install every driver available for that mobo and my OS? Sounds simple enough. I imagine the drivers are self-installing, right? (Click the file, let it run, automatic install?)


What kind of things will I want/need to switch around?


Don't know a thing about BIOS, is there any online documentation or do you have any guidelines I can follow?

Overclocking isn't a temptation to me at all; I've heard too many horror stories about overclocking gone bad and I can't afford to replace ruined parts.

Having never built a computer before, I'd like to be able to learn as much as possible before the parts arrive (ordered today, they'll come around Friday or Monday). Is there any good online documentation you can point me toward? I've found a lot using Google, but would rather go with personal recommendations if you have any.

Also, assuming a decent ability to actually put the thing together, is it realistic for me to expect to get this machine built and operating in one day?

Thanks for all the help, great information here. Who knows, before long maybe I'll be one of the experts helping other people with things like this!

Thanks again,

Matthew
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That's a very good choice, I run 512 mB and it's plenty, unless you run photoshop with many images open at once, then 1 gig is better. For normal use it's plenty, Windows takes about 128 mB, give or take.



Perfect solution, just don't wait too long or DDR prices will start rising once the new ddr format becomes standard, next year maybe.



No, just read the directions, the stuff all works.



Yes, there is a utility to install the main cdrom drivers, you can use that, then update the individual components, I can't remember if there is a fully updated driver installer, the gigabyte documentation is excellent however.



Bus speed, for processor and memory, mandatory, some other stuff, can't remember right off hand, gigabyte uses an excellent bios however, it's very easy to configure.



Yes, smart, overclocking = toasted processor and sometimes mobo, it's stupid, especially since you can get processors for fairly little money. If you want a screamer wait for Windows XP to support 64 bit processors, then get the amd 64 bit stuff.



You can download the documentation from the gigabit site in pdf format, though it's easier to read the little booklets they give you, those are really great.



Yes, it's realistic, with all software updates, driver updates, etc, I can usually have one of these things up and running in about 10 hours, but that's with practice. One day is completely realistic



:) yep, that's what I did, I never bought a pre assembled box, did once for work, hated the dell, always have hated it, made my first box, figuring if I don't learn it by doing it, how will I learn it? First box was fine, second box was fine, only regrets are that I didn't get the gigabyte mobo you got, I did what I advised not to do and saved a bit and got a soyo, which is ok, but not that great, all my pci slots are full, my ide is full, not the greatest mobo, ok, but too good to even consider updating, that's the problem with making it yourself, the stuff is so good you don't need to mess with it at all any more.
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When you install your Windows 2000 professional, make sure you install it using the NTFS file system, not Fat32.

Fat32 uses a 32 bit memory allocation size, and what happens is that once the hardisk gets bigger than about 500mB, give or take, the memory allocation units have to get bigger and bigger with Fat32, so if you save a file of say 1.2 kB, it still will take up the minimum size of the memory unit, say 64kB.

NTFS, on the other hand, uses a much more robust database for its memory allocation table, can't remember the upper limit, I think it's in the terra or petabytes, each unit is 4kB large no matter how large the harddrive or virtual drive is (what MS calls dynamic drives).

NTFS also is theoretically more secure, since you can use security settings on your files, but, as you will see if you try running knoppix, you can read password protected partitions just fine with knoppix linux running in your ram, it ignores the password/user name, can't write to harddisk, but reads it fine.
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Right, I've done several W2K installs before and always use NTFS. I'm looking forward to running on this new system. It's far better than any I've ever had, and what with a fresh, custom Windows install without any of the garbage you get with a pre-made box, this thing should fly! (Or at least fly compared to what I'm used to.)
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Once you have it up and running, I will envy your box, it's hurt me every time I make one of these for friends/clients, they are so ridiculously fast, it's painful, not that mine is slow, but these things are ridiculous, SATA harddrives are VERY fast, even though it's theoretically only a difference of 133mBps and 150mBps, I think the average data transfer rate is higher or something, standard IDE harddrives have a average transfer rate of around 40-50mB ps, 133mB is just the burst rate, the very fastest it can do, not what can be sustained.
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Okay, the case came today and looking it over, I'm beginning to feel a little encouraged that maybe this will be easier than I expected.

I think the main thing that confuses me is how to create the raid floppy disks. What files do I need? Seems like that's critical but I'm unsure how to proceed.

Also, I'll be installing a CD-RW, a normal CD-ROM, one 80-gig hard drive, and a floppy drive. How will I want to hook those up, master, slave, secondary slave, etc.? And, once I've got everything put together, how do I decide on and set the boot order? Think I can handle everything else, we'll see though.
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One more thing, I always partition my hard drives into C (system), D (Programs) and E (Data). I can get my hands on an old copy of Partition Magic, but I've never used it before on a brand-new machine. Do I need to install Windows first, or should the hard drive be partitioned somehow before Windows is installed?

Also, I may eventually do a dual-boot on this box, Windows and Linux. Would it be a good idea to create a separate partition for each OS? And while I'm partitioning, are there any other partitions I should create? I've heard of creating separate partitions for scratch disks and/or page files, not sure how or why to do that though.
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When you get the gigabyte mobo, there will be a driver cd in the package. To create the ide raid driver disks, browse to [assuming d: is your cdrom]:

d:\other\ite_raid\drivers, drag the drivers in that folder to a floppy disk.

for the sata driver disk, go to this folder:

d:\other\Sil\Si3112\Si3112

that's for the non raid sata drivers, for the sata raid drivers you would have gone to:
d:\other\Sil\Si3112r\Si3112

Once you get the mobo package you'll also get a ide raid and sata setup booklet, one for each, they'll explain it better.

Once you've made the setup disks, when you start the windows install process, you see the message 'hit F6 to install drivers'.

Nothing appears to happen, but it will ask you for these disks at a point later. If you don't get asked, start the windows install over, you missed the F6 prompt.

When you do get prompted for the driver disks, just follow the directions in the windows installer and it works fine, windows will install itself onto your Sata harddrive, it can't do this until it has the sata drivers.



SATA doesn't have master/slave, it's one drive per channel, there is no option for master/slave on sata drives, that's an easy one.

Since this motherboard has so many ide channels, 8 total, 4x2, don't use two devices on one channel unless you really need to. In other words, make each unit a master drive, the jumper configuration varies between brands, sometimes there is a simple master option, sometimes there is an option for master, one drive only on ide channel, check to see which it is. Sometimes the jumpers when configured correctly don't work, that's the only problem I've had with gigabyte boards, if you boot up and the system doesn't recognize the cd/cdr unit, that's probably the problem, just try moviing the jumpers until it does work, but you shouldn't have any problem as a rule.

The floppy goes to the floppy connector, no option there.



You set the boot order in the BIOS, I usually make it cd then hard drive 1/0, you'll only have one so it will be the first drive unit, terminology is confusing, harddrive 0 is the first one, like an array, since it's an array of drives.

To get into the bios hit del I think on boot, it will say in the manual, I think it's del.

Make sure you pull the cover tape stuff off of the processor thermal tape if it's present, some have tape, some don't, the newer amd's don't, that's confusing, if the thermal tape is very thin it doesn't have a plastic cover on it I think if I remember right



I moved the question on partioning the harddisk to the windows forum.
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