The PC equivalent of an imac for £200?
IntroductionI needed to put a PC together for experimenting with NT 4 server settings for my MCSE., while giving me a backup PC which my girlfriend could use to surf while I shredded UT bots on my games machine. Gaming and OTT performance not an issue, price and stability were what I was after.
The system
The components I ended up with were almost entirely second hand. Here I what went into the pot PC Chips 571 LMR motherboard (2nd hand, £25) K6-300 processor (2nd hand, £10) ATX case (new, £25) 14 inch SVGA Elonex monitor (2nd hand, £25) Quantum fireball 3.2 gig IDE HDD (from old machine of mine, probably worth about £30) Hitachi 16 speed CD-ROM and floppy drive £9 from computer fair 128 meg PC100 DIMM (again from old machine as it wouldn’t do 133mhz, would cost £70) Old keyboard, speakers and mouse from dodgy bloke at local car-boot sale, £4
TOTAL £198
Motherboard specifications
Here is the spec sheet, ripped straight from the PC-Chips’ website http://www.pcchips.com.tw/M571LMR.html ) · 512K Pipeline Burst Synchronous L2 cache on board; provides 2 DIMMs for FPM /EDO / SDRAM memory modules and is expandable up to 512MB
· Embedded Higher performance 64bit Graphics Accelerator with 4MB share memory frame buffer, supports Windows 98 Multiple Display feature
· 3D PCI Sound Pro on board, meet PC98' Spec., HRTF Positional Audio supports Microsoft's Direct Sound 3D and Aureal's A3D interface, with 4 channel speaker out; Software Wave-table Synthesizer, and 24 bit Digital Audio Interface (SPDIF) IN/OUT · 10/100 MHz Fast Ethernet LAN on board, supports IEEE 802.3 and 802.3u standards, and fully compliant ANSI X3.263 TP-PMD physical sub-layer
· 56K Fax/Modem on board, supports V9.0 Fax/Modem standard for internet communication
· 2MB Flash Rom on board, provides complete Advances Configuration Power Interface (ACPI) and Legacy PMU and the Ultra DMA 33/66, fully compliant to PC'97 and PC'98 Spec.
· Provides ATX power connector, supports various features of ATX power, such as Suspend / Shutdown, Alarm Wake-Up ,Modem Ring On, Wake on LAN, Interrupt Wake-Up from Keyboard/Mouse
· Built-in Hardware Monitor circuit supports thermal, Power and fan speed monitor; supports Intel LANDesk Client Manager (LDCM)(optional) Bundled AMI Desktop Client Manager detects abnormal condition and thermal automatically or management through the network link
· Supports PC99 Color Connector for easy identification of peripheral devices Aswell as all this, on mine there was the optional ATX form factor card which gives you 2 USB ports and a PS2 port.
Installation
The first problem I had was finding a case that would take a Baby AT form-factor card but with an ATX power supply. While it does have an old AT power connection, I find them fiddly to fit and can give ACPI problems. If I weren’t so fussy, I could have used an old case and saved a few quid more.
On the subject of form factor, this baby AT gets cluttered pretty damned quickly.. By the time I had all the connectors off the board connected up to the case, there was only one PCI slot left. Luckily all the on-board extras can be jumper-disabled. I would advise getting all the jumper settings right before connecting anything up, as the board ends up covered with a mess of cables pretty quickly.
The only real problems with the physical installation were with the IDE connections. I could not get it to see the hard drive for a long time, having tried several sets of cables. In the end I got it to work by wedging a bit of card in the side of the IDE slot to hold the connector in tightly. Whether this is a problem common to these boards, or is just a side-effect of having a second-hand board, I do not know.
Setting up the BIOS was not too difficult, although the AMIBIOS feels a bit dated compared to the more common AWARD BIOS most of us are used to. You can decide whether to allocate 2 or 4 megs from main system RAM to the onboard graphics, and the default refresh rate. Drive detection, once my cable problem was sorted, was very well handled. The auto-detection got it spot-on first time with no user input.
Note that the maximum FSB speed is 83 on this board, and it is only really meant to run at 66mhz. Given that most people would probably be using K6-2s on this board though, it is not a problem. Just up the multiplier – the way it should be. Drivers are supplied on the CD for Windows, 95/8, NT 4, and in some cases for OS2, Dos and various NT5 betas. There are some later drivers and Linux ones too on the website. Windows 95 detected all the plug and play onboard cards without problem. NT had a few more problems, especially with the COM ports. It could not detect the onboard modem from the modem control panel, and would not install directly from the driver files. In the end it did work by using the setup program which saw it as being on COM 1 (wrong!) and with a bit of tweaking COM 5 (correct but a bit odd, and only by creating a ‘fake’ COM 4 first).
The onboard components
Sound: this is actually very impressive. I tried out a few A3D 1 demos and it all worked fine. The virtual surround sound type feature of A3D is better than I had expected (being used to A3D 1 emulation on my SB Live, on my other PC) The 4 speaker option is a nice touch, but one which I havn't used as this wasn’t built as a games machine. Were you a gamer on a very tight budget this would be a valid option if you replaced th graphics card. On the subject of which: Graphics: the onboard graphics can be set from BIOS to use up either 2 or 4 megs of main system RAM. While this is fine for office application use, it is substandard for decent gaming, even 2D games. While it will do 16 and 24 bit colour quite happily at the 800x600 resolution I use, I got lots of chugging in Nox unless I turned most of the graphics features off. If you were wanting to use this board for a cheap gaming machine, I’d strongly recommend putting something cheap like a voodoo 3 2000, or even a Riva Vanta in the box, and disabling onboard graphics. Bear in mind that there is no AGP port on this board so the graphics card options are a bit limited. For my purposes though, picture sharpness off the onboard graphics is more than adequate. One final quirk I should mention: when I put an ancient m3d PowerVR card in and used it in 3d mode, the screen would corrupt every time I moved the mouse. I double-checked the card on another machine and it was fine, and I also played around with IRQs and slot placement. .I have no other spare graphics cards to play around with, so cannot tell if this is an isolated incident, but a bit worrying nonetheless. I suspect a similar problem might occur with voodoo 1 &2s though. They also work in co-operation with the 2d card.
LAN and modem. The modem is a 56k v90 affair and works well enough for a software modem, with no noticable slowdowns in use. My actual connection to the net is through a router however, so LAN performance is critical here. The LAN card is 10/100 fast ethernet with standard RJ45 socket and works fine. I kicked it straight into 100 full-duplex no problem. Neither the modem nor LAN have any flashy features but no major handicaps either.
General usage impressions
Despite my initial complaints about this machine when I was building it, it has proved to be remarkably stable. The old K6 300 is still a capable performer in an office and server environment , although I couldn’t honestly recommend it as a pro server board given its lack of a second processor or onboard SCSI.
So how dies it stack up against an imac?
IE5 runs perfectly smoothly on this machine, and for a potential imac user this level of performance is about a much as you want. I have several relatives who have in the last year bought off-the-shelf PCs or imacs in chain stores for over five times the price this cost me to make, and the level of performance off this is as much as they need. Real mac clone purists would of course have to 1 buy one of those nasty transparent blue cases 2 install windowblinds with mac effects 3 get a nasty mouse with a broken right button, and 4 remove the floppy drive
