- Joined
- Dec 17, 2000
- Location
- Southern California
I spent a load of cash, around $900, and was shoting for the awsome gaming machine. Here is what I got...
Abit KT7 133A Raid
T-Bird 950
Deskstar 75GXP 30gb
Sound Blaster Live! Value
ATI Radeon 32mb DDR
1 256mb SDRAM 133mhz
10/100 Ethernet
Maxtor Floppy
Creative 52x CD-ROM
300w psu
I don't think I am leaving anything out...as for cooling, not a problem considering i never even got to overclock. had the pal6035 and 3 case fans.
Ok now for the problems, and yes definitely plural... The motherboard was bad from the beginning, wouldn't even give me a screen. I decided to take it in to the comp shop and I watched them work away for about 3 hours and they got me a screen. I did a lil victory dance and went home, started getting this baby good to go. Windows was a major POS to install (win 98 second edition). I get windows going on it, am I in the free? The worst of my problems is soon to come. First was the sound card, I am on windows, everything is cooooool. Ok lets get this sound card installed I paid my 40$ I want to blow the roof off. Installed the drivers, rebooted, and after about 20 secs of being on windows, a loud, single beep tells me something is wrong. I try re-installing the drivers, twice. Something isn't right...Ok lets reformat and start over. Windows installs fine, but I got the same prob with the sound card again. I've heard stories of SB Lives having probs with high end machines, so I decided to just pop in the SB 128 bit. I reformatted, installed the SB 128, and no sound card probs. I figured the problems would start going away now, not at all. What's that? It doesn't recognize my Ethernet card??? It turns out 2 out of my 6 PCI slots wont work at all and a third is budged to hell with IRQ errors, (I belive it is something about interrupt query). Im like ok, that still leaves me with 3 pci and an agp, np man np. Swap the ethernet in a working pci, got my Radeon in the agp, im good to go. I didnt touch the SB during this whole operation becuase that took me long enough to get working already. So i got the cards in my working slots, reformat 1 more time just to be bug free. This is not at all the case, all the cards install fine, everything is good to go? Lets install halflife...I get constant lock ups, and even what it does do it isnt doing it at 950mhz. I finally decided return the mobo and processor, and I am going pentium. Im puting the radeon on my celeron and the 256mb ram on my p3 450. Im going to get a shuttle board, and not have any incompatibility probs becuase the computer store i went to will give me a listing of parts that work. Well hoped you liked my pc building horror story, I am losing about 40$ returning the parts, but to be honest thats lot lower then what i expected.
Abit KT7 133A Raid
T-Bird 950
Deskstar 75GXP 30gb
Sound Blaster Live! Value
ATI Radeon 32mb DDR
1 256mb SDRAM 133mhz
10/100 Ethernet
Maxtor Floppy
Creative 52x CD-ROM
300w psu
I don't think I am leaving anything out...as for cooling, not a problem considering i never even got to overclock. had the pal6035 and 3 case fans.
Ok now for the problems, and yes definitely plural... The motherboard was bad from the beginning, wouldn't even give me a screen. I decided to take it in to the comp shop and I watched them work away for about 3 hours and they got me a screen. I did a lil victory dance and went home, started getting this baby good to go. Windows was a major POS to install (win 98 second edition). I get windows going on it, am I in the free? The worst of my problems is soon to come. First was the sound card, I am on windows, everything is cooooool. Ok lets get this sound card installed I paid my 40$ I want to blow the roof off. Installed the drivers, rebooted, and after about 20 secs of being on windows, a loud, single beep tells me something is wrong. I try re-installing the drivers, twice. Something isn't right...Ok lets reformat and start over. Windows installs fine, but I got the same prob with the sound card again. I've heard stories of SB Lives having probs with high end machines, so I decided to just pop in the SB 128 bit. I reformatted, installed the SB 128, and no sound card probs. I figured the problems would start going away now, not at all. What's that? It doesn't recognize my Ethernet card??? It turns out 2 out of my 6 PCI slots wont work at all and a third is budged to hell with IRQ errors, (I belive it is something about interrupt query). Im like ok, that still leaves me with 3 pci and an agp, np man np. Swap the ethernet in a working pci, got my Radeon in the agp, im good to go. I didnt touch the SB during this whole operation becuase that took me long enough to get working already. So i got the cards in my working slots, reformat 1 more time just to be bug free. This is not at all the case, all the cards install fine, everything is good to go? Lets install halflife...I get constant lock ups, and even what it does do it isnt doing it at 950mhz. I finally decided return the mobo and processor, and I am going pentium. Im puting the radeon on my celeron and the 256mb ram on my p3 450. Im going to get a shuttle board, and not have any incompatibility probs becuase the computer store i went to will give me a listing of parts that work. Well hoped you liked my pc building horror story, I am losing about 40$ returning the parts, but to be honest thats lot lower then what i expected.
