Hardware

Inside track on VIA vs. Intel

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Retro Computing , , , , , ,
Inside track on VIA vs. Intel

Many probably read today that Intel sued VIA for patent infringement, then VIA turned around and sued Intel for essentially the same thing, stating that Intel needs a license from VIA in order to make the P4 and i845. This unexpected drama in VIA vs. Intel probably has left a lot of people scratching their heads.

Read more

SiS rises from the ashes, and tries to bring AMD and DDR with it

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Well, I’m back from Bible study (I was teaching on one of those things that can change your life, so I put all kinds of pressure on myself, and I have no idea whether I delivered), but we won’t talk about that right now. No surprises on the Daynotes circuit today; the Weblogs circuit is mostly talking about Kaycee still. I think I’m done with that. I haven’t had time (or will) to go do the cable re-routing necessary to get my new Duron-700 working perfectly.
So, what to talk about…?

How about DDR chipsets?

VIA makes more DDR chipsets than anyone else, and they’ve surprised everyone during the past 18 months, producing chipsets that were much better than anyone expected while Intel produced chipset after chipset that was, for the most part, far worse than anyone’s come to expect of them. Current Intel chipsets work, but they’ve yet to deliver a truly worthy successor to the classic BX chipset. But so far, VIA’s DDR chipsets so far have been disappointing, which makes me wonder if inability to follow up is contagious.

AMD makes a pretty good DDR chipset–at least it gives better performance than PC133 SDRAM, unlike ALi’s DDR chipset and VIA’s DDR chipsets most of the time, and, to be fair, unlike Rambus chipsets–but finding a motherboard based on it can be difficult. AMD’s not very interested in producing the 760, and it shows.

So what’s the DDR chipset to get for AMD CPUs?

Right now, it’s the AMD 760. But very soon, it looks like it’ll be the SiS 735.

Yes, I know, it sounds like I’ve been smoking crack. SiS has a well-deserved reputation for making underachieving chipsets. Just ask Steve DeLassus what he thinks of his SiS 530 integrated video. He’ll throw an Okidata 180 printer at you (ouch) and then tell you it’s almost as bad as the service you get from GPS Computer Services, that’s what.

And the SiS 735 probably isn’t ready for release just yet, as the problems discussed in this review seem to indicate–though whether the problem is with the chipset, the prototype board, or the BIOS, who knows. But the benchmarks indicate the SiS 735 is about 5 percent faster than the AMD 760-based FIC AD11 while costing much less.

Yes, the AD11 isn’t the best-performing 760 board out there, but then again, prototypes aren’t known for stellar performance either. So this sounds promising. Based on these results, it would seem that an Asus or an Abit could produce a very nice-performing board with the SiS735. And as for SiS’s ability to produce a good chipset? Well, these are strange times. Two years ago, AMD bet the company on the Athlon. They had a new, expensive fab they couldn’t afford, dwindling market share and reputation, and a history of botching product releases. If they did everything right and Intel did everything wrong, they had a chance of surviving. Well, AMD executed while Intel fumbled and fumbled. And VIA executed. Intel got caught off guard, and while they’re still king of the hill, they’re embarrassed.

And there was a time, about five or six years ago, when SiS chipsets were actually very sought after. SiS was the first company to produce a chipset that truly brought out the best in Cyrix CPUs, and people who were concerned with raw applications performance sought them out, because the SiS/Cyrix combination outperformed anything Intel was making at the time.

Can SiS rise again? Maybe. It looks like we’re about to find out.

My Duron: It’s alive! It’s alive!

Dave Farquhar Hardware

Solving the boot problem. I don’t know how I managed to forget this stuff. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.
I used an external SCSI hard drive to build up this system so I could get up and running without touching my old hard drives. I’ll want to juggle my data a bit. Of course it’s a lot more elegant to keep everything on a server drive. I never said I did everything right in this project. Actually I don’t think I said I did anything right in this project.

Well, the SCSI drive wouldn’t boot, no matter what I did. I even swapped out controllers. At one point I started wondering about termination. The drive worked, it just wouldn’t boot. So I recabled everything, making sure I had a terminator block installed, and using cables and terminators that I knew worked.

Rule #1: When a system acts goofy and there’s SCSI involved, always suspect cables and termination first.

That didn’t fix the problem, so I gave up on SCSI for a while. I tried several different hard drives in my new system. I’ve got a collection of smallish drives, most of which have some old DOS installed. None would boot. I disabled boot sector virus protection in the BIOS, and then one of the drives finally booted.

Rule #2: When building a system, find the boot sector virus protection option in your BIOS and disable it. If you want that feature, re-enable it after you get your OS installed. Just about every OS diddles with the boot sector during installation, which will make your BIOS very upset. Evidently, changing hard drives midstream can make your BIOS upset as well.

So then I put another drive in, one whose contents I totally didn’t care about. It wouldn’t boot. Finally I came to my senses and ran FDISK. It immediately gave me a warning: No partitions are set active. So that’s why endless SYSing wouldn’t make that drive boot, even after disabling the boot sector virus paranoia!

Rule #3: Whenever a disk acts funny, immediately run FDISK or Partition Magic or some other disk partitioning utility and look for goofy stuff, like no active partition set.

Then I took a look at my external SCSI drive. I’d forgotten I formatted that drive as one big extended drive–it didn’t have a primary partition. That’s why it wouldn’t boot. That’s a sneaky trick for adding a drive to an existing system without throwing off other drive letters, but then of course the drive won’t boot or anything. That kind of setup is great for portable data storage, but it makes the drive unbootable.

Rule #4: See rule #3.

Rule #5: Usually when you do something goofy to a seldom-used component, you have a perfectly good reason for doing it but you’ll forget what you did and why by the time you need to use it again. Write yourself notes and put them on oddly-configured hardware so you don’t rip your hair out the next time you try to use it.

Oh yeah, one more thing: This Duron-750 with 256 MB and an ancient SCSI hard drive (I think it’s a 4500 RPM model) running Windows 2000 really smokes. It boots in about a minute and everything’s silky smooth. Literally the only thing that keeps me from ordering a 10,000 RPM SCSI drive for it this second is noise.

Building my Duron

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

I broke my own rule last night. Twice. You should never take down a working system to build its replacement. Get the replacement system working, then take down the system to be upgraded. If you’re cannibalizing parts from the old system, get the new one going as much as you can before you start stealing parts from the old.
Well, I never got around to ordering more cases and video cards, and I had this really fast board and CPU sitting here doing nothing while a decrepit K6-2 that’s needed reinstalling for two and a half years (another thing I never got around to) sat around taking up space. So I took down the K6-2, only to find it had PC66 SDRAM in it. I vaguely remember how that came about. So I took down my Celeron-400, which I thought had PC133 SDRAM in it. I was half right. It had a 128 MB Crucial PC100 stick and a 128 MB Crucial PC133 stick. Decisions, decisions. I put the PC66 SDRAM in the Celeron (it wasn’t happy about that–it took me 15 minutes to get those DIMMs to seat properly) and took both 128s and put them in the new PC.

I re-assembled the Celeron and hoped for the best. It powered right up and booted. It’s not as nice of a system now, with 128 megs instead of 256, but the speed doesn’t matter due to the Celeron’s 66 MHz bus.

So I tore down the K6-2, lifted out the old motherboard, dropped in the new FIC AZ-11 freshly configured with a Duron-750 and 256 MB of SDRAM set to run at 100 MHz (if I’d had two PC133 sticks I could have clocked it at 133 MHz and still set the FSB to 100 MHz–this AZ11 BIOS is very nice). I reinstalled my PCI SCSI, network, and sound cards and my STB Velocity 128 video card–yeah, it’s ancient but I love that card, and it’s still fabulous for a lot of tasks–and connected up all the front panel LEDs and switches. While I had the system open I decided to pull the CD-RW so I could put it in an external enclosure. Since I didn’t have the faceplate anymore for my PCP&C midtower, I scrounged around for something to put in that bay. A 12X NEC SCSI CD-ROM? Marginally useful. What else have I got? Hey, is that a 5.25″ 1.2MB floppy drive I spy? Why not? I haven’t had a 5.25″ drive in a production system in about seven years. And hey, I like retro. So I installed that drive.

I plugged the system into my KVM switch, crossed my fingers, applied power, and got nothing. So I ripped the system back apart and double-checked everything. It looked good to me. But wait… Why do I have two leads marked “Power Switch?” My manual for my case is long gone, so I went to PCP&C’s web site. That brown/white lead is reserved for future use. OK, ignore it. Hook everything up, still dead. So I crack out the manual, since the silkscreen on the board obviously is either not enough or wrong. Oh. The speaker and power connect one way, and the others, including power, connect perpendicular to that. How odd. I reconnected the leads, powered up, and everything sounded normal. Nice.

I connected up an external SCSI hard drive, because I didn’t want to touch any of the old drives until the system was up and running. I made a DOS boot disk with my SCSI drivers on it (since this SCSI card can’t boot off a SCSI CD), but I didn’t get too far getting a modern OS installed. The SCSI drive kept acting weird and refusing to boot.

Instead of really troubleshooting it, I opened up my drawer of 5.25″ floppies and started playing around. I found my old DOS 3.2 floppy. I went into the BIOS, swapped the floppy drives, threw in DOS 3.2, and… to my amazement, that disk still worked. My fire-breathing dragon booted into MS-DOS 3.2. So then I tried my Commodore-branded MS-DOS 3.3. That worked too. It was funny seeing Commodore copyrights all over the place…

I’ll have to see if I can get things working right later this weekend.

It’s just about upgrade time.

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

Well, I’ve got a new FIC AZ-11 board and Duron-750 CPU waiting for me to do something with it. The AZ-11 is $65 (up $5 from when I bought it) at www.gpscomputersvcs.com; the Duron-750 retail is $50 (down $5 from when I bit) but the OEM chip is 33 lousy bucks. I think the retail kit is a good deal, since you get a longer warranty and you know you have an AMD-approved fan. Shipping was $10.50. Nice deal.
Over at Directron.com, you get a good selection of cases and power supplies. And you can get a Diamond Stealth S540 video card for $28 (my forum readers already knew that–hint hint). So, let’s see. Figure $200 for a case, power supply, motherboard, CPU, fan, and video card. All you need is memory, hard drive, floppy drive, and incidentals like an OS, keyboard and mouse and maybe a NIC. So you can have a perfectly respectable system for around $400, but it’ll scale nicely too if you want more. I know my P2-350 at work tends to hover at around 60% CPU usage, so a Duron-750 is way more than necessary for much of what I do, but it’s nice to have some CPU power in reserve.

First impressions of the AZ-11: It’s obviously a modified microATX design. There’s a placeholder for onboard video, which the KT133 chipset lacks (but the KM133, usually used on microATX boards, has). The leftmost 1.5″ of the board is mostly unfinished. Chop that off and it looks like a standard microATX board. It’s not the ideal board, but at $65 you’re getting FIC respectability at a PC Chips price. What do you want for 65 bucks?

With the Gigabyte GA-7DX now selling in the $150 range and Crucial PC2100 memory selling at PC133 prices, DDR makes sense if you’re building an entirely new system. If you want to upgrade something old on the cheap, an AZ-11 and a low-end Duron is a mighty big step up for $125-$150. It wasn’t that long ago that a 4-meg stick of memory cost that much.

And on another note (the CPU): What they say about the fans is true. Be very careful clipping on the fan, and once you get it on, leave it alone. It’s a really tight fit, so I can see why the hardware sites warn against crushing the CPU core. Frankly I’d be afraid to take the fan off the chip.

I’m also a little concerned about the known VIA KT133 problems. There are reports of data corruption on high-speed IDE drives, and apparently use of an SB Live! card makes them worse. And of course I’m going to keep my SB Live! in my fastest system in case I want to do voice recognition.

I just read today that the newest VIA 4-in-1 driver fixes that problem. But I’m thinking seriously about avoiding the problem by putting a SCSI controller and drive on the system. I wonder how many of the infamous IBM 75GXP problems may not have been caused by this. I know the KT133, SB Live!, and IBM 75GXP were an extremely compelling and popular hardware combination because it gave you so much bang for the buck.

Even if I don’t use a SCSI drive and controller, I’ll probably put a Promise Ultra66 in there since it’s known to be a stable, mature, and robust solution and I’ll have plenty of PCI slots available for it.

Tips on buying cases

Dave Farquhar Hardware

Cases. I’ve been thinking more about cases. Conventional wisdom says get the biggest case you can afford–ideally, grab that 12-bay full tower, just like you get the motherboard with the most slots. But I wonder if that really still holds. Modern motherboards integrate so much more than they used to (even the NIC, sometimes), what would you want to plug in? A better video card, probably. A better sound card, almost certainly. Maybe a SCSI card, unless that’s on the board. But, given five PCI slots, frankly I don’t know what I’d do with them.

With cases, let’s inventory the drive bays. You’ll want a bay for a CD/DVD, and another for a CD-RW (why wear out a burner by reading with it, when you can get a good CD-ROM drive for $35 and let it take the abuse?), and one for the ubiquitous floppy. A patch panel for the sound card might occupy a third 5.25″ bay. So we’ve chewed up four bays. In the past, the rest would probably go to hard drives. But you can get 75-gig hard drives these days. We live in an age, for the first time in about 12 years, that you can buy a hard drive that you can’t immediately fill. And by the time you do manage to fill a 75-gig drive, you’ll be able to supplement it with something even bigger. It seems to me that these days, even a 6-bay case is going to have a lot of empty space in it.

Let’s put together the absolute dream system. DVD drive. CD-R. Some flavor of DVD recorder. Patch panel for sound card. Zip (gack). Jaz (gack). Floppy. Two SCSI HDs for speed. One monster IDE HD for storage. We’ve chewed up ten bays. But how frequently do we put all that stuff in one PC?

The only time I can see using a large number of 5.25″ drive bays is when using high-speed drives that require active cooling.

I just don’t think monster cases are as important now as they used to be. Frankly, the seven-bay Foxconn case that Directron sells for $37 seems more than adequate, especially seeing as it has four exposed 5.25″ bays and two exposed 3.5s. You’ll want a better power supply, but assuming the case doesn’t cut you up, at that price it’s a steal.

Secrets about hard drive recovery and wiping

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

Recovery. I found this link while messing around: 200 ways to revive a dead hard drive. I’ve used some of these methods myself in the past. I imagine I’ll get to use more of them in the future.

Wiping. I needed a program yesterday to securely wipe out a hard drive. I was just going to low-level format it, but Western Digital’s drive suite, whatever it’s called, refused to do anything to the drive because it was returning an error code of 0207. The drive still worked, but according to my Web search, an 0207 means imminent failure. Hey, that’s why I needed to low-level the drive–we got a replacement for it and had to send this one back, but the drive was in an executive’s computer and probably had sensitive data on it.

Incidentally, if you’re getting an 0207 and you’re here because you want to know what to do about it, back up your data immediately and get it replaced under warranty. No, it’s not practical to fix it. If it’s out of warranty, I’m sorry. Sadly, it happens.

But I digress. How do you wipe the drive to ensure no one’s reading your sensitive data? I found some DOS freeware to do it at my usual sources, but one of them wouldn’t run under Win9x’s DOS, and the drive is too big to be recognized under 6.22. Another one wouldn’t handle drives bigger than 2 gig. Another one seemed to work, but seemed awfully fast.

Disk wiping isn’t a terribly complicated thing, so maybe I should just write a program myself to do it. It’s been forever since I programmed, and I do kind of enjoy doing that… once a year. Or every couple of years.

Monitor buying tips

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

Monitor time. Looks like I’m in the market for a new monitor now. I was talking about monitors the other day with a Web developer, who observed that when you buy a good monitor, it tends to stick around forever–the CPU just changes. He’s right.

Read more

Roll your own router with an old PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

Freesco works. Yesterday was D-Day. I brought a copy of Freesco over to Gatermann’s, set it up, and watched it go. Well, at first it didn’t–it got the two Ethernet cards confused. So I switched the cards and it fired up. Absolutely smashing, as they’d say in Britain. I dumped it to his old 1.2-gig Quantum Bigfoot hard drive, and it boots up in about 35 seconds. When living on a hard drive, Freesco wants to dual-boot with MS-DOS. He didn’t have DOS on that drive, so Tom dug out an old Windows 95 boot disk, with which I SYSed the drive. Then I just took the file router.bat that Freesco dumped to the drive and copied it to autoexec.bat. Then I rebooted and we got a laugh.

Starting Windows 95…. Then it briefly displayed the Windows 95 splash screen. Then the splash screen went away. Loading Linux, it said. Ah, Linux comes and kicks Windows aside. We both got a chuckle.

And Tom had a great observation. “The only time I ever have to reboot Linux is when I take the system down to try a different distribution,” he said. That’s about right.

I was talking about what a great use this would be for old, no-longer-useful PCs–as long as it can run Linux, it can be a caching DNS, a router, or something else useful. That means any 386 with 8 MB of RAM is a candidate.

But don’t throw away the 286s yet. Then someone had to one-up me. Dev Teelucksingh, master of DOS utilities, sent me a link: http://www-acc.scu.edu/~jsarich/ieweb/main.htm .

What is it? A DOS-based router. System requirements: DOS 5 or higher, 286 CPU, 1 MB RAM. Astounding. So even a 286 can be useful, even in this day and age. Licensed under GPL, so it’s free. No caching DNS, but hey, on a 286 with a meg of RAM and running DOS, whaddya want? And just giving the program a quick look, a hard disk should be optional–the program is 430K zipped, so it should fit on a high-density floppy along with DOS, HIMEM.SYS, and packet drivers for the NICs. Boot it off a 5.25″ 1.2-meg drive just to see what looks you’ll get. 🙂

Come to think of it, I have a 286 with a meg of RAM around here somewhere. Part of me (the insane part, surely) wants to give it a go. The question is, can I get two NICs working in 8-bit slots, since I know that 286 only had one or two 16-bit slots and I think they’re occupied by the disk controller and video card…

Here’s Dev (his site’s definitely worth a look even if you have no interest in IP masquerade–I’ve never seen a better collection of DOS programs):

Been reading your posts regarding IP masquerading and I found two DOS solutions (just waiting to get a ISA networking card to try either of them 😉 )

IProute v1.10          http://www.mischler.com/iproute/IPRoute is PC-based router software for networks running the Internet Protocol (IP). It can act as a demand-dial router between your LAN and a PPP or SLIP link, and allow transparent access from your LAN to the Internet using a single IP address through network address translation (NAT). It can also act as a PPP server for dial-in connections, or route between LANs. Other features include routing between multiple ethernet and serial interfaces, packet filtering, RIP, and event and packet logging to a remote syslog daemon. More recent features include proxy ARP, remote management via telnet and ftp, support for RealAudio & RealVideo, a RADIUS client, and a DHCP client. Shareware. (1 hour demo available for download)

Internet Extender     http://www-acc.scu.edu/~jsarich/ieweb/main.htm

The Internet Extender is a DOS based program designed to function as an Internet Gateway Router that performs Network Address Port Translation. The program must be used in an multi-homed machine, or a machine with two network interface adapters connecting to separate networks. The two possible configurations are: 1.) Connected to the Internet through a Modem 2.) Connected to the Internet through a Network Interface Card

Freeware, (published under GNU license) so source code is also available

Dev Anand Teelucksingh
Interesting DOS programs at http://www.opus.co.tt/dave
Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society at http://www.ttcsweb.org

— This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser —
—                 http://arachne.cz/                   —

The AT’s coming out of retirement

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , ,

Scary thoughts. UPS dropped off a pair of Soyo AT socket 370 motherboards while I was at work yesterday. So I’ll be picking those up from the apartment office after it opens this morning. That only means one thing. My PC/AT is about to come out of retirement.

Let’s think about that for a minute. When this ancient thing was built, Ronald Reagan was just starting his second term. The Soviet Union still existed, and the Evil Empire loomed large. The most popular game console wasn’t the Sony Playstation–it was the Atari 2600. Some popular rock’n’roll bands of the day: The Police and Duran Duran. U2 was on the map and rock critics knew them, but to the majority of people, the name conjured up images of a spyplane if it meant anything at all. The minivan as we know it today was just coming onto the market.

Dell Computer Corp. existed only as an operation out of a dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin, and it was known as PCs Limited. Gateway 2000 didn’t yet exist. The #2 maker of IBM-compatible PCs was Tandy.

Popular movies included Romancing the Stone, The Terminator, and Sixteen Candles.

U.S. airlines that were still in business: TWA, Eastern, and Pan Am. The most troubled airline at the time was Branniff Airways, which was in a long bankruptcy proceeding (it would later make a comeback, then die again).

Anyway… I pulled the PC/AT case out of storage, dug out some drive rails, found some Phillips screws that fit it (IBM insisted on using old-style slotted screws for some insane reason–I hate those), and I even dug out a vintage YE Data 1.2 MB 5.25″ floppy drive like IBM used. Then, noticing the 17 years’ worth of accumulated grime, I gave the case a bath. Now it looks two years old instead of 17. Actually, it looks pretty darn good. They don’t build ’em like that anymore. Of course, for what that case would cost to build today, an OEM can probably build an entire PC.

I’ve also accumulated other components: a junky Trident-based AGP video card is also about to come out of retirement, as is my old Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum card with SCSI interface. That CD-ROM drive died long ago, but I’ve got an NEC 2-speed SCSI drive that looks great in the case. (This system’s all about retro looks; if I need speed, I’ll use a CD-ROM drive off my network.) To accomodate that, I’ve got a D-Link 10/100 PCI NIC.

Just one thing’s holding up this project: Computer Surplus Outlet just shipped my Celeron processors. I ordered the boards and chips the same day. That’s annoying.