Advanced System Building 301 March 22, 2005

Introduction

Page:: ( 1 / 4 )

Start with the Right Tool for the Right Job

I’ll start by stating the obvious and saying that it’s important to pick the right tool for the job, and this means selecting the best components possible. I know we don’t always have the opportunity to do this since we’re often building new systems out of our old parts, but this is the most critical element. Without a good foundation, you won’t be able to tweak anything. When it comes to video cards, motherboards and CPUs you know what to choose – that’s what Brandon’s reviews are all about. The products that we don’t review regularly but are important are the power supply, chassis, memory, and hard drive.

I wrote an article on the importance of the power supply a while back. The power supply has no bearing on performance, but it has critical importance for stability. Don’t go cheap with a power supply – they’ll last. When it comes to choosing a chassis, you’ll want a precision-made case built with tight tolerances, so that drives and add-in cards fit snugly and securely. Airflow is critical, and a key goal is maintaining air flow – you want intake fans at the bottom of the case as well as a rear exhaust fans. Choose a case that has the unrestricted airflow you need. As the PowerMac G5 systems have shown, it’s not about simply having very high CFM or the number of fans – it’s about having enough fans and low enough resistance. I always go with fewer large fans than more small fans. In terms of system RAM, Corsair has always been at the top of my list, as they have a good understanding maintaining a balance between performance, “bling,” and reliability. That is, even their new XMS Xpert with the giant programmable LCD display runs as rock-solid stable despite the fact that you can directly program the LCD display via Windows. I’m not sure that the XMS Xpert is more stable than their standard XMS Pro line-up, but the fact that the LCD works as stably as it does means that the modules are built to a very high-standard. If I won the lottery, I’m sure I could run XMS Xpert modules without the LCD panel. Although my personal first choice has consistently been Corsair, the other FS staff also put their trust in OCZ, Kingston, and Crucial RAM.

Hard Drives

I like Maxtor Maxlines. There I said it. Maxtor, the bane of all hard drive manufacturers on Internet message boards, has been my top choice for close to a decade. I’ve never had a Maxtor drive crash when the drive itself was at fault, and Maxtor always seems to offer aggressive pricing, solid overall performance, and forward thinking technology such as FDB motors and large 16MB caches. My feeling is that it’s sampling error and reporting bias that have Maxtors looking worse than the competition – either that, or my systems are somehow better built where Maxtor’s don’t die on me.

Seagate and Hitachi drives are also good choices. Seagate is famous for silent performance (at the expense of speed), and Hitachi drives have up until recently been extremely loud. Western Digital drives have also been great drives, but my experience with their standard IDE drives has been less reliable. The WD Raptors are super-fast and reliable, but can add a lot of heat to your system, which is why I tend to hold off on the Raptor unless it’s a system that really needs the 10,000 rpm.

Assembling the PC

Before you assemble your PC, you’ll want to think about cooling and physical stability and know what goes where. Back in the day of wimpy plastic PC cases, top-loading your 5 1/4” drives resulted in an unstable tower that could easily tip over. Nowadays, the most important elements to think about are hard drive placement and PCI card placement.

Today’s 7,200 and 10,000 rpm hard drives release an incredible amount of heat. Keeping your hard drives cool is critical for both hard drive integrity and system stability. You should never install two hard drives in adjacent bays – leave space in-between. Well designed cases with the front intake fan blowing over the hard drive bays make HDD placement even easier. Since standard fans have a central portion where air does not move well, I usually have my hard drives at the top edge and bottom edge of my fan, ensuring that the drive receives the maximum amount of cooling. Also recall that heat rises and so the lower drive will usually run cooler than drive above. With good cooling, you’ll be able to maintain both drives with super reliability, but recall that the difference of five degrees can be a difference of 10 to 15% failure rate, and if it’s your hard drive that fails, that’s 100% to you.

Serial ATA drives have made a huge step forward in keeping drives cool, since you can now avoid the flow-obstructing 80 conductor flat ribbon cables. Keeping hard drives cool is so important, so I would still go with non-native SATA over EIDE any day. The small performance difference seen in benchmarks is negligible in real world use but the increase in reliability is not. That said, if you’re working with IDE cables, keeping the cable as straight as possible, with as few kinks as possible is a smart move. If you make any bends in the cable, try to make it a permanent bend. Think of your cables like twisty-ties from the supermarket, the more you bend them, the higher chance they’ll break and be unreliable.

I’ve avoided rounded EIDE cables longer than 18” for my HDDs when possible. Granite Digital IDE cables are indeed the best cables on the market, but if you follow my recommendations, you’ll be fine with generic 80-pin cables and can save some money.

Master/Slave Drives

With IDE, drives always are controlled by the slowest controller on the channel. That is to say that even though IDE controllers cannot simultaneously access two devices (which SCSI can), a setup where you have your HDD on master and your DVD-R as slave will be slower than having them as the master drive on two different channels.

PCI card placement

Video cards, particularly today’s high-speed GPUs emit a lot of radio frequency interference (RFI) that can interfere with your sound card’s performance by adding extra noise and buzz. For that reason, you always want to install your sound card in the PCI slot as far as possible from the video card in order to maximize audio quality. It’s a simple intervention that’s missed by many.

TV tuner cards are a predicament because they both emit a lot of heat (analog tuners) and RFI noise, but the receiving of noise will also affect the picture quality. In general, I feel the optimal position for the TV tuner is two slots away from the graphics card which typically is one slot closer to the video card than the mid-point between the sound card and video card. This will create a focus of increased heat between the GPU and TV tuner, but in a well design system chassis, it’ll be easier to cool your PC than it will be to shield the sound card from the TV tuner. Obviously, if you had an external Firewire sound card or were using a quality on-board sound card, then it would make sense to put your TV tuner in the last PCI slot.

Ferrite-bead Chokes

A ferrite-bead choke is useful in reducing RFI in multi-conductor cables. You’ll get the most benefit by adding a ferrite choke to analog cables such as a VGA or sound card cable. The third place where you might see an advantage is in shielding the cables that go from your motherboard to your front USB ports. In some cases, people with finicky USB devices that work well with the rear USB ports but not the front USB ports can solve their problem with new cables or better shielding. Fortunately, most modern USB controllers and devices and system cases are more tolerant than they used to be.

Windows XP setup

Page:: ( 2 / 4 )

If you’re playing games, you’re running Windows XP. Linux is great for specialized tasks such as number-crunching or programming, or miscellaneous work, but as bad as Windows XP’s color management is, it’s still better than Linux. As an aside, my personal choice for a Linux distribution at the moment is Vector Linux 4.2 running Xfce since it’s fast, lightweight, and easier to work with than Gentoo. When you install Windows XP, you’ll always want to partition your main drive into at least two partitions (although some people do three).

Why Partition?

With NTFS, the reason to partition is no longer cluster size and bloat, but solely for fragmentation reasons. You should always have a dedicated partition for your temp files and swap file. It’s tempting to actually put this on a separate physical drive to reduce the wear and tear on the main drive, but the disadvantage is that upgrading to a larger hard drive a more involved process. A good rule of thumb for your partition size would be 10GB. That would give you space to set your swap file at the size of your physical memory, and then have the rest of the space as a scratch disk for working digital images, your Internet Explorer cache, creating a 4.5GB DVD, or having a place where you can download torrents without fragmenting your hard drive all the time. I have used a Ramdisk for my IE cache before -- while this does improve speed, it’s more finicky and I don’t recommend it.

People going with a third HDD partition do this to adopt a Unix like approach where you can have a dedicated partition for programs and/or user data. If you’re like most people, your desktop is fairly cluttered and is a place where you store temporary files such as when you’re downloading a new game demo or trailer. You may also be installing and uninstalling new programs all the time. With a third partition and TweakUI, you can change the location of your desktop and My Documents folder to a different location. I personally stick with the 2 partition option because it’s easier to work when you have one megapartition.

As you install Windows XP, you’ll want to go into your network configuration and disable the QoS Packet Scheduler. The Quality of Service principle is cool because it’s designed to ensure that important data gets through. You’d rather delay a data packet containing your email message for a few seconds than delay data packets carrying streaming video. The thing is that unless you’re on a corporate network with a large number of hosts, the overhead of figuring out if a packet is tagged with QoS identification or not slows your system down. Most of you don’t even have QoS networking and so the system is basically saying “Does this packet have a QoS packet? No, OK, go ahead. How about this one? No? Ok, go ahead. Third times the charm?”

At this point you should not be connected to the Internet. Chances are you’re installing Windows XP with a non-SP2 install CD and although we all know that Windows XP is insecure and can imagine all the exploits that exist, there are in truth more exploits in Windows XP SP1 than you can imagine. You should have Service Pack 2 burned off a DVD or put on an external USB drive. You can get the 270MB file from Microsoft directly instead of having to go through Windows Update.

Once I install Service Pack 2 and I’m secure, I install SpyBot and immunize my Internet Explorer from the copy of SpyBot I have on my DVD. I then install my anti-virus software. Only now do I connect to the Internet and download the latest virus signatures, and motherboard, video card, and sound card drivers from the manufacturer webpages. I’ll then head to Windows Update to make sure I have the latest security patches. Only now do I consider myself to have a clean, fresh install of Windows XP and begin to install my core set of programs. I leave my anti-virus with real-time file scanning on – it’s slow, but worth the security.

Early optimizations

Page:: ( 3 / 4 )

1. Under visual affects, I’m happy with just disabling fade and animation. This speeds everything up while keeping things looking nice. I leave all the other miscellaneous effects on. I still remember when I saw “Show Window Contents While Dragging” for the very first time ever. It was on a PowerPC running Windows NT.

2. Under advanced, change your virtual memory settings to have a custom sized paging file on your second temporary directory partition. I have the initial and maximum size set to be the same number (fixed size) and remove the pagefile from my main C: drive. In general I think 1GB is good for 512MB systems, 1.5GB is good for 1GB systems, and 2GB is good for 2GB systems.

3. If you’re running an Athlon 64/Opteron or other DEP enabled system like I am, I change the setting to turn DEP on for ALL programs and services except for those I select. This adds extra security and is rarely a hassle.

4. Under startup and recovery, I disable all debugging information and uncheck logging of system failures. It’s not as if I’m going to use this anyway, and it’s not as if my systems crash. :)

5. Under environment variables, change TEMP and TMP to point toward my second partition (i.e. D:\\TEMP). Be sure to do this for system variables as well.

6. I then disable Error Reporting.

7. I disable remote assistance and remote desktop.

8. It’s up to you whether to leave System Restore enabled or disabled. I usually disable it and just leave it on for the scratch drive.

9. I keep automatic updates on and set it to a time during the day when I know I’m away at work.

Tweak UI

Page:: ( 4 / 4 )

1. Under General, I ensure that the silly things like menu and windows animation are disabled. I do not let Windows optimize my hard disk while idle since I use a 3rd party defragger.

2. Under mouse, I change menu speed to the fastest possible. This makes navigating through Windows much faster. The only reason to leave the delay on is if you’re building a computer for someone who’s not adept with a mouse.

I would love to use X-mouse, where the window focus changes without changing the ordering of the window, but there are enough non-standard API Windows apps that automatically force themselves on top when the focus is over one of their child windows that it doesn’t work as well as it does in X. So even if you’re a hardcore X windows user, I still recommend leaving it off. You’ll be less frustrated that way.

3. Under explorer, I enable classic search for explorer.

4. Under Thumbnails, reducing the image quality can reduce HD space. I leave it at the default.

5. Under desktop, I add my computer, my documents, and recycle bin

6. Under command prompt, I enable tabbed filename and directory completion.

7. Finally, I enable auto-logon. TweakUI for Windows actually encrypts your password now.

With all of that complete, I make my final trip to Internet Explorer, move my cache to my temp drive, reduce the size to <100MB and have it check for new versions every time. I disable auto-resizing of images, set my home page to where else but FiringSquad.com... (Actually, it goes to my.yahoo.com but I do have the FS RSS feed.) The hard drive gets defragged and I now have a fast, high-performance system ready to run.

From here, I can move on and make modifications to the specific hardware control panels (i.e. my NVIDIA or ATI control panels or sound card settings). These are specific to each system so I won’t go into that. Likewise, BIOS optimization is often unnecessary (guides are particularly troubling to write because there is too much variation between system components. It’s a shame that many “gaming oriented” motherboard manufacturers don’t hire a tuner to write an optimization guide to include with their manual).

So there you have it, a short course on the personal touches I put in when building my own system. As I mentioned in the intro, this article isn’t designed to be didactic and tell you what’s “right” but should instead be thought of as a discussion between colleagues. Are you one of those people with a different partition strategy, or someone who’s runs a ramdrive for IE cache permanently? Do you have a different approach to PCI card placement? I’m curious to hear what others out there are doing, and you can make your thoughts heard by clicking on the comments link on the frontpage.