Building a new PC

In building a new Athlon64-based PC the following points of interest were found:

• The highly-praised Asus K8V SE Deluxe motherboard is good, but has a rather large unresolved bug. Described in an Asus FAQ, it means that if you plug an SATA hard disk into one of the two main SATA ports then the hard disk light does not ever get activated. With hard disks getting quieter, I'm finding it more useful than ever to watch the HDD activity light to see if the PC is actually doing anything. As such, this is a monumental bug, and one that Asus have known about for at least 4 months, but not fixed. The two mitigating factors with this are that Asus has great technical support. If you contact them via their web site, then a human actually responds in half a day or so. Secondly, this motherboard has a second SATA controller built in. It's not as integral as the first, but it works fine, and the light goes on with it.


• This is the first Antec case (an Antec Performance II SX635BII) that I've played with, and it's great compared to my five-year old Aopen one. The design is spiffy and finger-friendly. Even so, one complaint is that the wires connected to the front firewire and USB ports are identical, and unlabelled. So when it comes to plugging them into the motherboard, you have to either dismantle the front of the case to trace which is which, or note that though the cables have the same ends, they have different pins unconnected.
  
  Update (1-Oct-2004) After building another PC using the same model of case, and finding that the firewire and USB plugs are labelled, I shall adjust this complaint to one of quality control, unless this labelling is a new innovation, in which case I say well done.


• The motherboard came with a sticker of the motherboard layout to affix to the (inside of the) case. Very useful.


• The Benq (FP767-Ver2) 17" LCD monitor was described as purple, and I was expecting purple, with perhaps a little bit of black. If I'd studied the picture on the web site closely before purchasing, I'd have seen that a better description would be white, with a dash of purple. Still, I'm, impressed by the huge viewable area compared with my old ADI Microscan 5V+ (16" viewable) CRT


• The heatsink for the Athlon64 is of a greatly improved design compared to the Athlon XP (and previous CPUs). It's pretty foolproof now, and doesn't even require the dangerous high pressure screwdriver manoeuvre to install.