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[strredwolf]

After some delay with UPS at my request, and some confusion that UPS caused... yet made up for when I got home yesterday...

My new rig arrived!  Yes, I bought the parts for another computer.  It's an AMD Athlon 64 X2 based system which now requires the Biostar mobo to be taken out and shot -- I'm going to switch it to a Gigabyte board after two weeks.  It's running now, and compiling up KDE.  I'll be transferring some stuff there too, as this rig, redwolf, is replacing tygris.

"Wait a min, you fuzzball." You'll say. "redwolf is a laptop!"

Actually, no.  I bought sandra (Dell Inspiron E1505) to replace the old HP Omnibook 6000 named redwolf.  The name's been sleeping as the laptop's been given to my sister.  So, tygris is the next to pop out.

Comments

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

Baaaad design and programming. For example:

The board layout is, as the English say, rubbish:

The northbridge fan is actually over where my chosen graphics card is over, blowing over the card. And it's a passively cooled NVidia Geforce 7600GS.

The 24-pin power connector is against the USB/Ethernet/Serial/keyboard/mouse ports, which causes the power cords to cross across the CPU area as well as the monster AM2 heatsink I have on there. If I don't arrange it correctly the fan turns into an circular saw. Same for any other power cords.

And talking about the fan, the board didn't want to even turn it on at first, causing my distro to shut down because it was too hot. It's now working.

And the base programming of the chips themselves...

The system doesn't program the various APIC's right, making me have to pass the "noapic" command to Linux.

The sound system isn't supported in ALSA, so I had to shove my old SB Live! card in there... which I think actually makes the old card an upgrade...

But most of all, my last board from Biostar had a cold-start issue -- it had to warm up before you could boot and be stable. Otherwise it'll freeze hard. Essentially, I had to double-boot every day. I think I even asked about having a BT878 card in there, and why it kept freezing up when I had the IDE in DMA mode. The reply back was "Turn the AGP mode to 4x." Um, it's been like that since I build the damn thing.

I'll keep the boxes and docs. When I get a new mobo, I'll sell this one.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

The 24-pin power connector is against the USB/Ethernet/Serial/keyboard/mouse ports, which causes the power cords to cross across the CPU area as well as the monster AM2 heatsink I have on there. If I don't arrange it correctly the fan turns into an circular saw. Same for any other power cords.
Even more annoying with some recent Pentium fans that have virtually no guard on them to keep cables away from the fan blades - which I have to deal with routinely, so I sympathize.