My New System install

[ROfu]

Building my new Media Center Box.
Welcome to my new build, This is the first time ive documented my build but in todays day and age, with blogs everwhere i thought i would join in. The purpose of this overview is to allow other users too see whats been done, maybe answer some of thier questions about bits thier considering buying. If you have any questions at the end please post, i'll be more than happy to answer.

Hardware Bought -
This system was bought as a media center computer, that would allow for gaming as well as the standard dvd/tv viewing.

Abit AB9 Pro Motherboard
Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4ghz)
Zalman CNPS9500 AT heatsink/fan
Geil DDR2 Ultra 4-4-4-12 (2x1GB)
e-GeForce 7950 GX2 (standard version)
Samsung SATA 400gb HDD
Samsung SATA DVDRW
Terratec Cinergy 2400i DT
Zalman HD160 Home Theatre Enclosure
Windows Media Center Edition 2005
diNovo Media Desktop Laser

HDD installation -
The Samsung HDD was chosen due to its price, and from past experience thier reliable and quiet. The first thing i decided to check out and fit was the HDD - i know the motherboards normaly peoples first choice, but i wanted to see what the screw connections were like. This case is built for super quiet operation, and from experience outside of obvious fan noises are Optical drive and HDD noises from vibration. (HD160 builder tip - your going to need a magnetic long tipped screwdriver Or a lot of patients) The fit for the HDD has a nice quality feel to it, fits very solidly to its cage and with the rubber washers and rubber clamp on each side gives you the impression most vibrations will be subdued. (Note althought ive installed the HDD in the cage, the cage has not yet been reinstalled into the case - this gives you a little more room to work)


Motherboard installation -

This board was chosen for its out of the box compatibility with the 7950gx2 and Core 2 chip (well its listed as supporting both on nvidia and intels sites read the "OS install" section to see if this is true) Opening the AB9 box your introduced to the same box layout as Abit have been using for sometime, nice clean presentation and well fitted boxes. At this point i would like to mention the case and boards build quality are excellent, there have been many times over the years where building a machine has become a mission, due to screw holes being obstructed by component parts or case struts not lining up with the holes on the motherboard - both the case and the motherboard were simple no hassle and quick to install. The motherboard layout is a little strange, the IDE port is under the second PCIEx socket as well as other 2 sata sockets. why they have chosen this design i dont know, there seems to be plenty of empty PCB space in other parts of the board, thankfully i will not be needing either but it is something worth considering when working out the spec of your new machine. There are 3 USB, internal connectors, which perfect for this case, allowing the addon back panel USB ports that come with the motherboard to be connected, as well as the LCD front panel (uses half of a usb connector), the front Card slots (uses the other half of one of the usb connectors) and the front USB ports on the case, there are 2 Firewire(1394) - this gives you a choice - There are 2 seperate connectors for the motherboards back panel addon, one for 4 pin (camcorder style connector) or one 6 pin (firewire HDD style) connector, then the cases' front panel (6 pin). There are NO built in firewire ports on the motherboard. I chose to use both the larger 6 pin connections, one on the front of the case and the second backpanel addon (i have no need for a 4 pin connector on the back of this case, you can use a 4-6pin converter for the front if you wish to hook up your camcorder) As you can see from the pic, the cables are already starting to look a little busy - you could clean up what i've done to allow a little more airflow from the bottom vent but im not concerned about this for now, keeping the motherboard clear is more important personaly. Last point relating to the Motherboard is its Fan connector placements - They are all on the outer edge near the sata ports. The only fan connectors close the backpanel of the board, is for the CPU and NBfan (northbridge? stated as the chipset fan in manual, as the northbridge has a passive cooling unit, i guess this could be used for a case fan connector). Irrelevant to thier positions, there are 3 aux fan connectors and a casefan connector, which should more than suffice for this build.

 

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CPU installation -
Having never installed a LGA775 chip before (Only using socket 478 P4s and AMD chips) I found it a little strange seeing the pins on the "wrong" component its installation however was as simple as any other - I personaly like this new opposite method, being an Ex vapochill owner and seeing the pins rotted clean off the cpu (you can never put enough thermal goop on ) this means only the mobo would have been ruined, and as i've seen many friends snap pins on thier cpus over the years rendering them a few hundred pound paperweight, this makes a nice change.

Heatsink/Fan installation -
HOLY MONKEYS, this thing is HUGE, i dont think ive been so supprised at a electronics item in ages. Again in true Zalman fashion, the item was well packaged, very well built - and thus came my first retarded mistake. Having just spend the better part of an hour setting up and installing the motherboard, I just realised that the zalman heatsink needed its connector installed on the back of the motherboard. before anyone thinks "noob" dont bother im already bashing my head on the desk. After getting past my own stupidity the heatsinks installed and looks very imposing, just have to hope its good enough for a bit of overclocking and still keeping the system quiet.

Ram installation -
Simple ram in slots.. done
Of note the Ram slots are well spaced - unlike a previous board, which had the slots so close together the ramsinks make the dimms too wide to place 2 next to each other, on the ab9 the slots have just about enough to fit in the ram without them starting to fan/bend outward.

 

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GFX and TVtuner card installation -
Same install as usual, although i will mention that the Front panel audio cable is rather ugly where it is, not particularly tidy, you can run the cable against the motherboard under the gfx cards heatsink, but i chose not to do this as the heatsink on the 7950 gets very hot, the smell of melting plastic doesnt appeal. Thankfully one thing i was glad about, was the twintuner doesn't cover the 7950 fan, so although is heatsink is partially covered, there is nothing stopping the airflow out of the case from the gfx card

PSU installation -
Last but not least the PSU. Having never bought a tagan before, i was massively impressed upon initially opening the box.
The first thing that impressed was its presentation, clean well finnished and nicely designed. There were plenty of cable ties, connector caps and all the cables were very nicely finnished and good solid quality feel. Considering this PSU wasn't the most expensive i've seen by a fair way for the same output, its refreshing to see a manufacturer have consideration for thier customers. The cable ties are a great addition, very inexpensive to the manufacturer, but quite a bonus for myself as i didnt have to go hunting for my own. Its small touches like these that manufacturers should include as oftern as possible.
The actual installation into the case was nice and simple, you will have to loosen a small clip in the case just below the PSU for it to fit, but this is meant to do this (theres a slider bracket).

 

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DVD installation -
You may have noticed in the pictures that the DVD cage is currently installed but no dvd, unlike the HDD cage which you could remove with moderate ease, the DVD cage, also has the front usb/cardreader bay in the cage, to remove this would have made it a little more awkward to setup the cabling for the usb/firewire etc, so i left it in untill i needed to install the dvd, then i simply took out the holding screws slid in the dvdrw and screwed it back into place (if the dvd had been installed earlier it could have made the PSU installation a bit more of a mission.

HDD cage installation -
Ok this is where i hit my first problem. If you have a full length gfx card and install the HDD cage, youll notice that the room permitted for the PCIEx power connector is quite small, and with the Tagen having large connectors you need to bend carefully the power connector to fit in - its rather tight, and had to be carefull i didnt make the gfx card bend in any way.

BIOS setup -
This was a little tricky to start with, having and AMD mindset, but soon as i remembered the old p4 478 days it was easy enough. I bought the 6600 because it seemed like the best cost/speed ratio, and all the core chips are supposedly good clockers. These Conroe chips really do overclock well, having booted with 2.399ghz showing up with DDR667, strangely it didnt see my ram for DDR800, but wasnt worried about this for the moment. I upped the system from its default FSB in increments of 20 to start from 266, 280, 300, 320, i kept this up to 340, at which point it wasnt stable. I had already upped the voltage to 1.425 and didnt wish to go much beyond this ... yet. The highest stable clock was 334mhz FSB, which made my little 2.4ghz conroe run at 3.006ghz. Very happy with this overclock on air so far.. and the chip only showing 35deg/c in the bios blipping to 36deg ever so oftern. At this point i was running the ram at about 670 which considering the ram is DDR800. was running a little slow - like mentioned earlier for what ever reason the computer wouldnt boot with it set to 800 (bios update most likely needed)

 

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Windows XP media Center installation -
The first thing i did before installing the OS, was to lower the chip speed to 2.9ghz. The lower speed was used to guarentee a clean and successfull install, as although the chip posted perfectly well at 3ghz there was no way of knowing how it would perform under the stress of an install. First thing of note during the install of windows, because of the card readers (the front panel ones) the pause while waiting for the choice of which HDD to install, was longer than expected, leaving me to think the machine had hung. I had one crash during the install of windows, good ol blue screen - am not sure if this was the overclock or just windows being randomly useless. It did however, install fine on the second attempt (Edit - as a quick note windows was installed fine using a SATA dvd drive).

diNovo Media Desktop Laser - installation
Installation is mixed, I have 2 of these sets, the first install on my work computer was a pain in the backside. Nothing wanted to connect, took atleast 4 restarts and updates of its software before it finaly began to work like it should. This time on my new box, installed the CD first with nothing plugged in restarted plugged in the dongle and everything was found with no issues, luck of the draw i guess. This is an awsome bit of kit. The equipment looks great on the coffee table, has really nice laptop style keys and the mouse is great. Even as a lefty the mouse was still comfortable to use. the media pad is great - It gives you a little jingle if theres a new email in the box, shows the currently playing track details in its lcd display and allows control over all the normal functions (play/stop etc) this also works for iTunes, which is supprising. It can also be used as a calculator seperate to the computer. The set is a little expensive, but when you first take it out of its packaging you'll more than smile, and the money will seem irrelevant.

Software and Drivers installation -
All installed smoothly and quickly, MS update found 120 items needing updating... when that was finnished, the Zalman HD160 Case drivers were installed, this had an issue, for some reason it couldnt replace a windows system32 file during the install, and therefore screwing up giving an error. To correct this i manualy opened up the system32 directory, dragged the file in question (msvcr71) onto the desktop - which windows had no problems accepting, i then reinstalled the drivers which went on fine, restarted and deleted the file on the desktop. all other driver installations went by the book, occasional restarts and ready to rumble (as a small note during one of the many restarts i popped into the bios again to check on the temps, and solid as a rock still on 35/36degC)

Tommorow i will be installing some benchmarking software, as well as trying out the TVtuner.

 

[androo]

Looks like a nice system. I hadnt seen inside these cases before but they look to have more room than I imagined.

 

[ROfu]

TVtuner -
Ok this was by far the biggest headache i had during the install, consistant crashes, lockups and blue screens (not seen this many since win98 days). After reading numerous posts on these forums and other, finaly found a set of drivers which actually worked (v260). I tested the tuner, with recording on channel while watching the other, and all seemed fine. playback of the recorded program was great, worked exactly like it should with Windows Media Center Edition, allowing you to fast forward, rewind and pause. of note i also started watching this program as a test while it was still recording, and was able to rewind and pause perfectly fine without disrupting the recording. I still have the occasional random crash, but these normaly result in crashing out of media center to the desktop, rather than taking out the entire machine. Hopefully with new drivers all these issues will be solved. Note to Xbox360 owners, using media center via the xbox is stunning if you have your box connect to a HD screen, all the programs look crisp and vibrant - infact for the moment atleast they look better than viewing via the PC (ill explain this later) only niggle i will say about using the xbox to control the media center, is it doesnt seem to support xvid/divx playback. I'm going to look into this and see if there is a solution.

HDTV connection.
initiall when doing my first benchmarks I had connected the PC to the tv via a VGA cable, this was to guarentee a signal and to setup the Nvidia drivers ready to use the HDTV connection. while using the VGA connection i found the colors to be weak and flat also using a Sony tv, i was limited to 1024x768 which had to be stretched to fit the widescreen ratio. I initially had benchmark results of 9500+ in 3dmark06 at this resolution, which was quite impressive. Having now connected up the Component video connection to the tv, i was now able to get a proper 1280x720 widescreen resolution. Did the benchmarks again and got 9200 which for the moment i was happy with.
(Note to SLI users running the HDTV. Resolution of 1080i will give you strange flickering - from what i can *guess, this is because its interlaced so the SLI is having trouble working out what it should be rendering, as SLI is based on Full Frame acceleration. With fields i guess it either doubles up or skips to the next frame giving you the flickering. 1080p on the other hand should be no problem).
I've ordered a HDMI - DVI cable, so hopefully the slight fuzz on text on the desktop will be minimised (as im running the component via a passthrough on the amp atm - not the best solution) also hopeing Maybe.. the overscan wont be as bad.

Ok heres some pics from 3dmark06.
I took these purely to show what it looks like running off the tv. One thing you will notice, the CPU benchmark is smaller than the actual screen, this is while the Tv is using 720p

 

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Finaly Media Center, and how it looks next to other AV equipment, and the Xbox360.

 

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Thats about it for my new build. Will continue to overclock and find a sweet spot for speed/temp/noise.

A note on noise before i finnish - this system makes about the same amount of noise as an Xbox360 when running 3dmark/games and about half as noisy when using just the tvtuner/media center.

If you have any questions please post, otherwise enjoy the pics and hope this helps any new builders considering a Media Center box for thier HDTV

Cheers
ROfu