Tech Talk
Milt Hull
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Building Your Own Machine
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Well, I myself, am in the middle of upgrading all my machines and I had to make plenty of choices when choosing a system board, a processor and memory type as well as new cases. I started with choosing some custom cases from Antec which, in my opinion, had the best combo anywhere when it came to looks and functionality. My platform was going to be the new Pentium 4 series so I needed power supplies that supported that technology with extra connectors that those boards need. I then set out to choose a system board that had everything I needed. I found one that had six USB ports, all type-2, and a couple of 1394 ports for my firewire connection to my video camera. It had all the standard serial, parallel, game, sound, network, and keyboard and mouse connectors. It has 6 PCI slots as well as an AGPx4 slot.
I purchased three of these boards but I needed two more that were a smaller platform because two of my systems had smaller cases. I found a board that fit and had all of the above plus a built-in video card. I purchased those as well. Since I did my homework, I decided on Pentium-4 processors instead of something cheaper.
The following is what is available out there now for motherboards, appropriate power supplies, and system memory.
Power Supplies
When choosing a current-model system board, you have several decisions to make and the first is the power supply type. The old style "AT" power supply is not for any board you will be buying today. It comes with two connectors, called P8 and P9, and is for old machines, from the 286 to the Pentium 200, up to and including the AMD/500 boards.
However, the only type motherboard now available requires an "ATX" power supply with a 20-pin connector.
These supplies, while delivering more wattage, also provide lower voltages for the newer Pentium II and Pentium III's. However, the Pentium 4 requires even more wires, adding a 4-pin connector to help supply more voltage to these chips. If you are upgrading an older case with a newer system board and it is a Pentium 4, you can purchase an 4pin adapter to help supply that extra power.
Xeon boards require even more power and need a power supply with a 12V, 24-pin connector,. plus the extra 4-pin connector - especially the Dual Xeon boards. I know, I just built 5 Dual Xeon systemsall by myself.
Socket Types
Another history lesson_ Once upon a time you had to manually press down on a processor to push it into it's socket, and was very difficult to remove. You had to carefully pry it from the socket with a screw driver. Often, pins were damaged because of this problem. Starting with the Pentium, boards were supplied with a ZIF socket (Zero Insertion Force). It had a handle which opened up holes so you could just drop the processor into the socket. You would then just move the handle down and the socket would grip the pins. This type of socket is still used today on many motherboards. The exception is the "Slot 1" and "Slot 2" which supports the "stand-on-edge" design that, at the time, Intel thought would be the future standard, allowing for a much larger CPU and a tightly coupled cache. This design was used for most of the Pentium II and III's until Intel went back to the flat socket design.
AMD has created a "Socket A"-type for most of the processor's made by AMD including the "Athlon" and the "Duron." Intel, however, used the Socket-423 and now the newer Socket-478. The older Socket-423 was for the original Pentium 4 but the new 478 supports faster and better memory interfaces.
There are other socket and slot types available including the "Slot A" for the Alpha Processor and Digital Equipment. "Socket 370" is made for the Celeron processor and there is also a "Super Socket 7" for system boards with a 100MHz bus.
Specialized sockets are made for custom processors including a "Socket 8" made for some Pentium Pros and a newer "Socket 603" made for the Xeon chip.
Memory Type
Memory never stays the same. The first PC used chips that you would insert in groups of nine - they looked like short black caterpillars. Soon, a bank of chips came on a prefabricated board called a SIMM (Single Inline Memory Module). However, these changed as well. Soon, a design for much greater memory capacity became available called DIMMs, and now there are DDRs, SDRs, and RDRAMs available. I will talk more about memory in future Tech Talk articles. In the mean time, do some homework before deciding how to upgrade or build your next machine.
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