As BYTE is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.

This week Jerry Pournelle on building a new desktop.

Anastasia: Intel D875PBZ Canterwood

I have just finished building and bringing up Anastasia, a D875PBZ motherboard, 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 with 800 MHz Front Side Bus (FSB). The Intel Code name for the D875 chipset is Canterwood; this board is code named Bonanza. It has 512 Megabytes of DDR 400 memory, and two Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA (SATA) 120 GByte Hard Drives. The Pentium 4 and motherboard use dual channel memory and hyperthreading technology. This machine is properly described as smokin'!

The D875PBZ comes with on-board Intel PRO/1000 CT Desktop Connection LAN, no video and, surprisingly, no audio. I don't miss the on-board video, and in fact never use on-board video even if it's there, or at least I haven't for a while. Others, including Bob Thompson, find the on-board video good enough for their purposes and the Intel drivers stable. My own experience has been that by the time a board with integrated video comes out, older ATI and nVIDIA boards are available at low cost, and they'll generally have better drivers, too.

I generally don't use onboard video, but I have become accustomed to having integrated audio on Intel boards, and it has always been at least Good Enough for nearly anything I want to do; but this board doesn't have it, and I missed that.

The Sound Situation

Alas, since all of my recent new machines have been built on motherboards with integrated audio, I haven't paid much attention to the sound card situation. Now I had to choose a card for this new system, so I called Bob Thompson who does follow hardware if you build or maintain your own equipment you really need Bob and Barbara Thompson's PC Hardware in a Nutshell (O'Reilly, 2002; ISBN 0-596-00353-6).

His advice was to get an El Cheapo board from any company whose name you recognize. They almost all use the same chips, and Windows has pretty good drivers. That ought to be about twenty bucks. The next step up would be Turtle Beach's Santa Cruz sound card, which has just about all the quality and features most of us will ever need. Turtle Beach has built high quality sound electronics for decades. The Santa Cruz runs about $70, and Thompson considers them considerably better than the comparably priced competition. Finally, there's the Audigy 2 series note the 2, you don't want the Audigy from Creative Labs. Those are very high quality and have lots of features, but it's not likely I'll ever need either the quality or the features.

A quick trip to Fry's showed that the cheapest Audigy 2 was $129 and they ranged up to well above $200. The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz was $70, and I bought that, gnashing my teeth as I did it, because they had sent me that board a few months ago but, because all the systems I was building had built-in sound, I never installed it. A few weeks ago I was cleaning out and I sent it over to the Media Lab where I'm sure they're very happy with it. I was on short deadline so I gritted my teeth and bought the Santa Cruz.

The Video Question

I had several choices for video boards for Anastasia. What this machine really deserves is the new ATI RADEON 9800 Pro. They're sending me one, but it won't be here before I have to file this column. I have two ATI RADEON 9700 Pro boards. The 9700 is not quite as fast as the 9800, but would certainly do to build the new system with. The problem is that one 9700 is in Sable, the system I am writing this column with, and I'm not going to tear apart a working system in order to build and test another. The ATI 9700 RADEON Pro board works wonderfully well, with beautiful clear text, and of course handles photographs and games and splendidly. I'm not about to take this machine apart.

The other ATI 9700 is in Lance, my wife's new machine, and even touching that machine is Right Out. Roberta is very happy with her 2.8 GHz D845PEBT2 system and ATI 9700 RADEON Pro (see the February 2003 column) and I touch that at my peril.

So. I didn't have one of the new 9700 or 9800 ATI boards. I do have an nVIDIA GeForce 4 I could use. That's what's in the system Anastasia will replace, and there's another in Shaman, the new D45PEBT2 games system I've just put online. The board works well, and there are good drivers for it. It's good enough for any games I have or am likely to get soon.

The problem is that Anastasia is destined to be a communications system, handing email, text documents, web surfing, and my web site. A lot of its duties have to do with words on a screen. There's nothing wrong with the text displayed by nVIDIA boards at least not after you turn on ClearType but it's just not quite as clean and crisp as text put up by ATI boards. It's good enough, but ATI text is excellent, and I will be spending a lot of time looking at Anatasia's output.

A quick trip to Fry's showed that ATI RADEON Pro boards, both 9700 and 9800, are selling for $400 or so. Worth it to those looking for the very last ounce of performance, but a bit steep for a review system. And of course I had got this motherboard and chip on a Friday, the column was due Monday, and there was no chance at all of getting a new video board from the manufacturer. I don't much like paying for review stuff, but every now and then I do, partly as a quality control test.

And there, all by itself, was an XTASY "powered by ATI" RADEON 9100 Pro with 128 Mb memory for just over $100. It was the last one on the shelf, and I grabbed it.

Okay, this guy shopped at Fry's??? There are about a bazillion better places (and cheaper too) to shop... was this guy from the California Bay Area?

Steve: have you run across any articles about small systems based on the Centrino? I'm looking for a small form-factor system for some Java-based POS systems I'm building.

cstaylor wrote:Steve: have you run across any articles about small systems based on the Centrino? I'm looking for a small form-factor system for some Java-based POS systems I'm building.

What? Steve knows everything about anything else we ask about, so I thought I'd give it a try...

Thanks Ultra... something like that, but I don't need floppy or CD-ROM... just USB, video, and LAN.

Maybe we can talk more on Saturday. How long are you in town?

Naw, what you're looking for is this:

http://www.ipdtaiwan.com/Products/Micro_Barebone_PCs/Espresso/espresso.html

The smallest, well, maybe not the smallest, PC ever.

Right on! I just sent them a RFQ on a sample unit. I'll let you know how it works out.

Espresso PC is no more... at least, they aren't taking orders. So I investigated VIA's new Eden architecture (and the Micro-ITX motherboard). We're ordering one of the Casetronic machines for testing. I'll let you guys know how they work out.

Hmm, they still seem to be available in the states but only the cd-rom version:

http://www.ibuypower.com/product-pc/pocket-epc.htm

http://www.ibuypower.com/product-pc/pocket-epc2.htm