"Fleet computer challenge"

[blakerwry]

I just bought the ak32L the other day for $60. It runs great... the most painless motherboard I've ever had...

Shuttle also has a bit of BIOS updates so it will atleast take a 2400+ (that's pretty good for a kt266 board)

I'm running an Athlon 800mHz w/ 256MB ECC pc2100 right now, but will soon upgrade to a duron. All I have is a HDD, CD, NIC and a TNT2 in the box, which I assume is pretty close to what you'll have in your setups.

 

[cas]

Our vender told me that's because there is no 'cache' on the SOHO. (Therefore, cheap).

Tell your vendor not to make things up on the spot, when they don't know the answer to a question.

 

[Buck]

I hate myself for this one but...

Shuttle AK32L @ $55 (newegg) is just about as disgustingly cheap as things get. If the 1600+ can fall another $10 or so, this might actually be doable.

Of course, RAM prices will probably eat all that... Gads this is awful. How do you stay in business, Tony?

ECS K7VAT3 v2x (integrated audio)
Duron 1.1 Ghz
256 MB PC2100
ATI Xpert 2000
Netgear FA311 (supports RIS)
Mitsumi FDD
Samsung 52x CD-ROM
Samsung 20 GB 7200 rpm HDD
Enclosure w/250W PS

$370.00

 

[Buck]

If you would go with an integrated solution I could use the Asus A7N266-VM with onboard LAN, Video, and Audio, use the other items I listed (minus the onboard replacements) and come in right at $350.00.

 

[Tea]

Buying one ECS main board is a gamble, Mercutio. Buying sixty ECS main boards would be suicidal. Far better to go with the ASUS or the Shuttle. Both companies have had some monumental stuff-ups, but at least they don't do it as a matter of habit.

 

[Buck]

Buying one ECS main board is a gamble, Mercutio. Buying sixty ECS main boards would be suicidal. Far better to go with the ASUS or the Shuttle. Both companies have had some monumental stuff-ups, but at least they don't do it as a matter of habit.

Typical!

 

[James]

I bought 4 Intel PCI Pro/100 NICs here on Ebay for AUD10 each (USD5.50) out of a lot of 50. Merc, if you like I can see if he has enough to service your needs (shipping will increase the cost, of course, but NICs aren't very heavy).

 

[Pradeep]

The Netgear 311 is a shite card, it has known compatibility probs with AMD machines, the 760MP chipset in particular. The 310 is the Tulip based card, much better compatibility (tho apparently not supported under .Net Server)

 

[cas]

Oh no! It's the Tasmanian FUD monster!

I should mention for Pradeep, that all of my AMD762 based systems, have FA311s in them.

 

[Pradeep]

Well I had two FA311's, and on my TYAN TigerMP, the use of either would cause only one CPU to be detected, followed by a POST screen f###-up. You will note that I used the term 760MP

I contacted Netgear support and they said they would exchange for FA310's. I ended up selling both to someone with Dell machines.

 

[Mercutio]

I thought those issues were with the straight-up 760 chipset, not the newer 761/762.

James, I'm going to buy Realteks at this point. If I can make them work with RIS, I'm a happy guy.

Buck, would you actually be comfortable maintaining 60 machines with ECS boards in them? Keep in mind that I'm dealing with mixed PC Chips (Alton, Acorp etc) stuff now, and it's not making me happy. Also keep in mind that if I'm building these machines - and I really don't want to - I have to see the people using them several days a week.

 

[cas]

This post was sent from one of my TYAN TigerMP boards, equipped with two processors.

If you have received it, my FA311 works.

 

[CougTek]

I have to ask you that someday guys but...what is FUD for? I know the meaning, but I just can't find the words that would match the F.U.D. letters.

The ECS K7VTA3 is very stable, no headhache in view here. I never had to use a magic wand to make those I used to work. The latest BIOS revisioon of their KT266A model gave a nice AGP performance boost. Dunno for their KT333-based model though. The K7VTA3 isn't as budget-oriented as the K7S5A and the board feels noticeably less shaky. While the K7S5A sometimes needs a little bit of extra care in order to wrk reliably, the K7VTA3 works well from step one. Just like the SiS735-based though (and most ECS motherboards), it doesn't have much overclocking features so forget about retriving "extra-value" from your systems with this motherboard.


Tony,

Mind you, ECS boards actually work just right (well, most of those I tried) in the northern hemisphere (and in the southern hemisphere too, just not around Ballarat it seems). By keeping to spout that everything from ECS is utter crap, you are implying that many of your fellow members don't know their stuff. I see it as a lack of respect. Buck, James and I own no ECS shares AFAIK. If it really was crap, we would sing the same song that you (endlessly and tediously) sing. But the fact is that no matter how crappy their past products were, those they currently sell are mostly ok. Not wonderful by any mean, but acceptable for budget boxes.

Your blind hatred of ECS would pass a lot more smoothly if you would show it in a similar way as Mercutio shows his about NVIDIA ("I've had very bad experiences in the past with..., I didn't have much success with... instead of It's crap). Continuing to shout everywhere that ECS is crap like if it couldn't be anything else (showing lack of mind opening) just like if it was as certain as the Earth is round will soon worth you to be call Wizard.

 

[cas]

I just can't find the words that would match the F.U.D. letters.

Fear
What if I buy an FA311, and it doesn't work? Will I have to buy an extended warranty, just in case?

Uncertainty
The FA311 seems to work just fine in my systems, but Pradeep is a smart guy, and he has had problems. What if I have to travel to Oz with my computers. Maybe the FA311 doesn't work with the reverse polarity they have down there

Doubt
I just can't be sure. For that warm and fuzzy feeling, I think I will pick up an expensive, undifferentiated, or arbitrarily crippled 3Com card.

 

[Mercutio]

And hey, speaking of bad bad experiences with nvidia, one of my dedicated testing workstations has been locking up intermittantly during paid-for exams for several weeks. Needless to say this is not cool. At first I blamed the testing vendor, then went looking for stupid windows problems, but the environment on that machine is FAR too closed for there to be that many problems.

Then I noticed the %$^@ing GF2 MX in device manager, tried detonator 30 - no good for lockups - so I replaced the GF2 with an old SiS620.

Guess what? The lockup issue went away. I think maybe the rinky-dink heatsink on the GFMX might've been the cause, but I really can't tell and I really don't care.

OK, back to the other stuff:

cas, what exactly are the requirements for your product like? Specifically, I'm thinking that 11MB/sec for everything to a bunch of managed disks somewhere isn't going to have the performance I need for some of the more ridiculous stuff we do, but it might work very well for, say, Office/Windows/Internet training.

 

[Tannin]

Coug, for once in your life, listen up: I don't constantly bag ECS /PC Chips products. I have given credit where it is due, here, on my own website, and at Storage Review. I grant you, credit to those dishonest scoundrels isn't due very often , but they do sometimes make things that work, and I have said so, right up front. You want to go making things up and putting words into my mouth, you do it under your own name, not mine.

Mercutio: don't forget that your reputation is on the line here. If you take a chance with the universally-known absolute lowest bidder in the industry, a firm with a known and proven reciord not just for appalling quality control and fifth-rate service, but for outright fraud ... well, you could be lucky and get away with it (as I said, some of their products work quite well sometimes) ) but if they do live up to the worst traditions of the PC Chips heritage, you are screwed, and screwed two different ways: (a) they are much more likely to give problems than a quality vendor's products (e.g., ASUS, Gigabyte, etc.), and (b) because you will have to, if push comes to shove, honsetly admit that your motherboard manufacturer has an appalling history of fraud and shonk, and that you knew about it at the time.

They say that "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM". Don't expect anyone to extend that motto to PC Chips.

 

[Mercutio]

I'll admit I'd be happier with Biostar or (and again, I hate to say this) Shuttle than ECS. Honestly, I don't know what to think of their products right now. I've got a distributor telling me their stuff is "decent", in reference to, I think, the K7S5A. I've got Buck and Coug telling me not giving me ringing endorsements but also saying they aren't the crap they were.

And then I've got the long view, from the redhill site (fake RAM and name changes), my past experiences with their late-90s crap, and the late-90s-vintage crap I'm putting up with now.

Buck, would you be willing to buy a board or two if I try them and decide I'd rather not use 'em?

 

[Pradeep]

This post was sent from one of my TYAN TigerMP boards, equipped with two processors.

If you have received it, my FA311 works.

Interesting. Do you know what revision your mobo is? Mine is 1.2

I switched to a D-Link and it works just fine.

 

[Bozo]

I know you said you don't want a 'all-n-one' motherboard, but have you considered an Intel board? You can't argue about the quality, and for $104 you get Lan, Video, and Audio.
In next years budget, consider upgrading the video.
The peace of mind of having a proven motherboard without compatablity issues would be worth having an 'all-n-one'

Bozo

 

[Tannin]

I'd consider Intel boards for our own entry-level systems, Bozo, except for one thing: I haven't figured out how to make the CPUs fit into those weirdo sockets.

 

[Mercutio]

The problem with an Intel board is that I'd be stuck with an Intel chip. Or, more correctly, I don't think my budget could survive a $104 motherboard plus a Celeron CPU.

I'm thinking if I only had to do 50 PCs instead of 60, that would make a HUGE difference in what I could purchase.

I really think I need to make some kind of business case for more money. As things are this just doesn't seem quite do-able.

 

[Tannin]

Ahhh .... An Intel CPU. So that's how you get them into the sockets!

 

[Tannin]

More seriously, Mercutio, that sounds to me like you are heading in a useful direction. Let me ask you this: what there the best ten or fifteen systems you have at present. I know you have an assortment of different stuff, if you were to go through them and pick the eyes out of the existing machines, what could you make. For an imaginary example:

Three machines have had motherboards replaced. The replacement boards still have the old Celeron 600 CPUs, but could take a Celeron 1300. Keep those three boards. Two of your crappy PC Chips boards have K6-III chips in them. Three of your K6-2/400s have decent boards. Swap the chips over to make two half-decent mainboard/CPU combinations. Steal the 64MB SIMMs out of some ot the other machines to upgrade those five to 128MB, or 192Mb if you have the sokets to spare.

Now go looking for half-decent hard drives, video cards, and CD drives. NICs too. Put all the best ones in the best five machines. Buy a $28 new case to make them look nice (you can justify this to yourself by saying that it's time the PSUs were upgraded).

Now you have only 55 machines to buy, and your only expense (bar labour) is 5 * $28. Oh, and there is the P-III 933 in the janitor's office, that's worth using. And so on.

What have you got there? Surely there is something in that motely collection of 60 machines that you can re-use?

Also, I have the lengthy document (about 11 pages) that I hand to people that are thinking about buying a computer. Among other things, it discusses long-term cost of ownership issues in a simple, no-nonsense way. If you are aiming to put a presentation together, you'd be very welcome to a copy of it. With a lot of cut, a little paste, and some good old fashioned plagarism, it might be useful as a starting point. PM me if you like.

 

[Buck]

Mercutio,

I would be comfortable maintaining 60 machines, each using the ECS K7VTA3. I’ve sold systems using this board and my personal machine has one of these boards with an Athlon Thunderbird 1400C processor. I don’t have any experience with PC Chips like you and Tannin do, so I still subconsciously separate ECS from PC Chips. Judging by the quality experiences you two have with PC Chips, I’ll continue with that subconscious mode. I have sold the odd ECS K7AMA board as below-budget boards, and they are just that. Their design and implementation are well below average (for example, the BIOS only supports up to a 40 GB drive), making the K7VTA3 look like gold. I have not had any experience with the ECS K7S5A board. I would be happy to buy two K7VTA3 boards from you if you would like to test them out.

Enough about ECS. Making a purchasing decision of 60 PCs should not be contingent upon the experiences of Tannin, Coug, or anyone else, but your own. You are taking the responsibility of the purchase, you need to be comfortable with the purchase. That includes the components you buy, and place you buy them from. Even if your superiors make the decision on cost, the blame will eventually come down to you when there is a failure, and when it does happen, you cannot pass the responsibility onto someone else, like ECS, Biostar, etc. That is why Tony’s admonition to create a cost proposal is in your best interest. You propose the components that you feel most confident with, even if the cost is beyond budget, and argue for its favor. If cost needs to be reduced, you find other ways to meet that need. Reduce the amount of PCs purchased; cannibalize parts from the older PCs (how many of those floppy drives still work fine? Why do you need to upgrade so many CD-ROM drives? How much speed do you need from a CD-ROM?); re-use a small amount of the older PCs for niche uses (are all 60 PCs going to be used by individual students accomplishing the same task? or are certain PCs slated for less arduous tasks, or can they be used by some of the teachers?). You have many decisions to make Mercutio that include a great deal of calculated thought. We are here to give you help, but only you know the best decision to make.

 

[Buck]

Pradeep,

I’m sorry you have Tannin like ECS experiences with Netgear FA311 cards. But like other things, they work fine in the Northern hemisphere.

 

[Mercutio]

The best machines I have - by far - are eight Tbird 1200s on mixed Asus and ECS boards. 128MB RAM, 12x CD-RWs and crappy 40GB U-series drives. They're more than adequate for the tasks they're given (four are mixed in the classrooms, four are dedicated to running the testing applications we have).

I'm already including these machines as not needing upgrades.

The step down from that are a small number of slotA Athlon 700s (three or four), on PC Chips boards with two PCI slots and integrated everything (modem, NIC, video, sound). They are otherwise the same as the rest of the hardware. These machines are horrible; I don't think their power supplies are anything near up to the task, and they crash more than any machines I've ever seen.

I also have a smattering of P3-450s, which are no more up to the tasks they've been given than the K6-2s.

I have at my disposal a literally endless assortment of 10GB slug-drives. WD Proteges and Seagate Us, mostly, but even a couple of Quantum lcts. Nothing better in that department.

And that's the best I can do.

 

[Buck]

Mercutio,

My first option would be to avoid the Protégés and Seagate Us. If anything, you’ll need the fastest disk sub-system you can afford. You’re better off with a 800 Mhz CPU but a quick 7200 rpm drive. I would also be more inclined towards more and faster RAM then a high speed CPU.

One of the benefits of a non-integrated system is purchasing components that can actually meet the speeds of the CPU. Think of the impact that paltry 128 MB of SDRAM has on a system. Running Windows 2000 and a few other slices of auxiliary software, is going to shrink your memory availability down to 5 MB causing your swap file to be hit constantly. Imagine that disk being a Seagate U series drive, and the slow time it will have accessing data and reading and writing to the swap file. Regardless of how fast your CPU is, your system will seem slow. Add to that integrated video, and you have yourself a clump of under-budget-Compaq-wanna-be.

I know I’ve mentioned this in other threads, but I still find it amazing how a Socket 7 board with an Intel 233 MMX CPU, 256 MB of PC100 RAM, with an 8 MB AGP video card, ISA sound card, PCI NIC, and a WD200BB running Windows XP can feel snappy next to a Compaq with 128 MB of RAM, a Celeron CPU running on a i810 chipset with integrated LAN, Video, and Audio, plus a Bigfoot drive. It isn’t until you reach the likes of nForce-based boards that you see real speed from an integrated solution (the new nForce2 being a real performer in comparison to the previous generation). Hence, I’ll recommend the nForce as an integrated solution, but if the budget allows, I’d prefer separate components – components that I pick and are confident in.

Those P3-450s you have should be good enough for the workload you’ll be handling, as long as they’re not tied down to a slow integrated system. The same goes for those SlotA Athlons, they’re only crippled because of the boards they’ve been forced to work with.

How much of an impact on work will 12x CD readers be in comparison to spending money on new 52x drives?

 

[Tannin]

As an experiment, slip a decent PSU into one or two of those Athlon 700s. Athlon boards can be incredibly fussy about power supplies. Two chances out of three the problems are the main boards, but one chance in three that the right PSU will magic all the instability away. If they happen to be Slot 1 Thunderbirds (of which a great many were remaindered cheaply), it's three chances out of four to be the PSU.

Those hard drives should be a real resource for you. Twin 10GB drives, even slow ones, can make a huge difference. Or, swap them. I'll need to check my numbers (I'm at home) but I know that we give a really good trade-in for 10GB drives. I'd come pretty close to swapping even: 2 * second-hand 10GB for 1 * new 40GB unit. Not quite, but close. Rule of thumb: expect a fair proportion of the U Slugs to fail, be prepared to trust the Proteges and the LCTs.

 

[CougTek]

My first option would be to avoid the Protégés...

How did you do the é with your US English keyboard layout? Anyway, nice touch.

How much of an impact on work will 12x CD readers be in comparison to spending money on new 52x drives?

How about : Unable to read CD-R and CD-RW?

Buck is right about the PIII 450MHz and Athlon T'bird 700MHz. They would be fine if they would be on a decent motherboard and PSU. However, it's hard to find slot 1 and slot A new motherboards these days (much less in large quantities).

I would present the options like they are on the table of the wallet holder. "Give me more or not all your PCs will be less-than-three-years-old technology. Or if I build 60 boxes with your paltry 25000$ limit, they won't fill all my teaching needs". You can't invent money or cheaper computer parts Mercutio. A decent computer cost a given amount of cash and you cannot drop below that. The wallet holder has to get that message and then it will be up to him to make a decision (increase the budget or live with less-than-respectable equipment).

You could also suggest him to upgrade the majority of your boxes bfore the end of the fiscal year and then upgrade the remaining with next-year's budget, if your 4 years limit isn't past that time of course.

 

[Buck]

Coug, Mercutio mentioned that those 12x CD devices are CD-RWs, so I'm not sure if compatibility would be that bad. I shouldn't have just referred to them as "readers".

The Protege accents are from MS Word. As you can see, typed straight into the Message Body box doesn't yield the same results.

 

[cas]

How did you do the é with your US English keyboard layout?

I use the United States-International keyboard mapping.

'+e=é

The settings can be changed in the control panel in w2k, and work with standard US keyboards.

Legal, não é?

 

[CougTek]

I use the United States-International keyboard mapping.

'+e=é

When I set my kb layout to EN, this combo doesn't work. Oh well, no big deal. It would just be useful when I want to make a quick post right after a new OS installation where I forget to modify the kb layout. My normal layout is French-Canadian (bunch of twits, they should name it Quebecer layout, not french-canadian).

Thanks anyway.

Legal, não é?

Huh?

 

[LiamC]

US Keyboard mapping -> é = ALT+0233 on numeric keypad

ie, hold down ALT key, and type 0233 on the numeric keypad, vòilá "é"

Install character map, it is your friend for typing accented letters in most fonts

 

[Tannin]

Keyboard design in general is hopeless. I better start a new thread for this one ....

 

[CougTek]

Thanks guys.

Mercutio,

Forget NewEgg. They refuse to allow large orders on some components. For instance, I couldn't order more than 5 Athlon XP 1600+ or 13 InWin J508 cases. Multiwave doesn't have this problem and the shipping on large quatities is reduced too. But I still cannot fit within your 22000$ budget for 60 machines.

And don't consider the Enermax chassis I listed above. The holes for the fan openings are far too little to allow a good airflow. In fact, the only two decent budget enclosure I saw were InWin's J series and Enlight's 7280 with the 340W PSU. The Antec SLK1600 would be quite nice if it would include a rear fan...but it doesn't.

 

[Bozo]

My sugestions:

Intel integrated MB(video,sound,lan) $104
Celeron 1.7GHz Boxed $72
WD200BB hard drive $64
Antec slk 1600 casew/300w $53
Aopen CD-ROM 52x $24
Kingston 256MB $70

Total $387


Scrounge the remaining parts from the old PCs

These are all quality parts without compatability problems.

Bozo

 

[Bozo]

One small suggestion. Unless you have a lot of help, don't order all 60 at once. Order the parts in small batches. But, let you vender know what you are doing so he can ship when you are ready.

I just assembled 9 servers for our company and found getting 5 at once was more than enough.

Bozo

 

[Tannin]

Good point, Bozo. It works the other way, too. Bar the giants, most suppliers are more comfortable with working with a moderate number of systems at any one tme. Better a steady flow than a single massive batch. And this way, you can make sure that you are happy with the quality and service of the first batch before you sign off on the second batch, and your supplier has the chance to deal with any issues arising before he orders the parts for the second and subsequent batches.

 

[CougTek]

So?

 

[Mercutio]

My current proposal is to eliminate a lab of computers. That drops us down to 48 machines that need upgrades and gets me into the right budgetary ballpark.

I'm thinking that the other 12 machines can be made up in leasing notebook PCs (an idea everyone REALLY likes for some reason), which gives us some flexibility in deployment and in our accounting (lease = fix monthly expensive instead of capital purchase & depreciation). Of course there is still the "can we afford it" question, but that one isn't mine to answer.