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Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] has nothing to worry about from IBM.

IBM's GXP Deathstar hard drives [slashdot.org], as/. regulars are well [slashdot.org] aware of [slashdot.org], are exactly that. Death comes to your data on these drives eventually [techreport.com]. Too bad for a large number of customers [techreport.com], it came sooner rather than later.

When the news first broke [techreport.com] on these drives, some [techreport.com] tech sites [storagereview.com] came out [viahardware.com] with the news, and others [tomshardware.com] kept fairly silent. Silence isn't a crime. But continuing to use Deathstars in review gear should be. Why? Because some readers, myself included, used reviews and testing gear examples from Tom's Hardware to build our first computers. Take advice and recommendations from the experts, and you get a better computer, right?

As the current/. story points out, why bite the hand that feeds you advance facts on hardware under ndas, and direct contact with company engineers?

Consumer Reports [consumerreports.org] buys everything [consumerreports.org] they test. With the money that Tom's Hardware has made from advertising on its site (from reader views), they should be doing the same.

Don't take my word for it. Check the dates of when the Deathstar stories first appeared. Then check the hardware reviews on Tom's Hardware. Not just hard drive reviews. Check reviews of other hardware related or dependent upon hard drive speed to get some benchmarks or results. Then see what hard drives are used in the benchmarks, and in the review gear.

While some of their readers went down in flames, others were announcing that the there was a problem, and they continued on as if nothing was wrong. They may have acknowledged the problem in a small story or two iirc (maybe not even that), but they continued using the hard drives in their review gear, without a footnote or warning about them.

Why? emx

Tom's Hardware has nothing to worry about from IBM.

IBM's GXP Deathstar hard drives, as /. regulars are well aware of, are exactly that. Death comes to your data on these drives eventually. Too bad for a large number of customers, it came sooner rather than later.

When the news first broke on these drives, some tech sites came out with the news, and others kept fairly silent. Silence isn't a crime. But continuing to use Deathstars in review gear should be. Why? Because some readers, myself included, used reviews and testing gear examples from Tom's Hardware to build our first computers. Take advice and recommendations from the experts, and you get a better computer, right?

As the current /. story points out, why bite the hand that feeds you advance facts on hardware under ndas, and direct contact with company engineers?

Consumer Reports buys everything they test. With the money that Tom's Hardware has made from advertising on its site (from reader views), they should be doing the same.

Don't take my word for it. Check the dates of when the Deathstar stories first appeared. Then check the hardware reviews on Tom's Hardware. Not just hard drive reviews. Check reviews of other hardware related or dependent upon hard drive speed to get some benchmarks or results. Then see what hard drives are used in the benchmarks, and in the review gear.

While some of their readers went down in flames, others were announcing that the there was a problem, and they continued on as if nothing was wrong. They may have acknowledged the problem in a small story or two iirc (maybe not even that), but they continued using the hard drives in their review gear, without a footnote or warning about them.

Why?

...IBM GXP deathstar drives, for many months to possibly even over a year, after everyone else exposed these drives for what they are, and after they were given a heads up on more than one occasion to pull their head out of the sand.

There are several more 2600+ reviews, and these are much better too.
AMDZone.com
Hot Hardware
Tech-Report
Overclockers.com.au
Ace's Hardware
Firing Squad
Hexus
xbit
Anandtech
Van's Hardware
VIA Hardware
The Inquirer

Pricey indeed. The complete specs for the A1000 they put together is on their site. I'm sure if you badger them for the complete specs on the NES or A2600 they'll tell you. There's no custom-manufactured hardware in there; this is just a pricewatch or ebay affair here, folks. Even the "adapted" NES controllers they're selling for $40 (!!!!) are available on the net, or you could even make them yourself. But, whatever, the 40-50% profit they're making is alright with me, if I find the urge to have a PC in an NES case, I'll do the research and build it myself...

If you're interested in Small Form Factor (SFF) stuff, I'd suggest this forum.

"With an AGP slot, this is the perfect small LAN box, and the onboard video looks to be shaping up well too."

Also, FWIW, I've read that a shuttlegroup employee said that the SS40g was their last SFF box without AGP.

next

Wait another couple months. The SN40 is coming. It's based on the nForce2 chipset, but otherwise expect similar specs to the SS51.

• nVidia press release
• VIAHardware nForce2 article
• Small Form Factor forum (search for SN40)
• or Google it yourself

Wait another couple months. The SN40 is coming. It's based on the nForce2 chipset, but otherwise expect similar specs to the SS51.

• nVidia press release
• VIAHardware nForce2 article
• Small Form Factor forum (search for SN40)
• or Google it yourself

next.

bye, bye viahardware.com
Hope they're not running on an SS51!

If you have to be such a blatant karma-whore, at least get it right:

http://www.viahardware.com/ss51xpc_1.shtm
http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/shuttle/ss51/ss51g p1.htm

Better pics.

And the MSI K7D Master

Up to 800mhz too! You can buy them here The ITX motherboard format is the way to go. Shuttle has offerings in the area too.

Its a matter of when you had your first VIA experience. I've got the KT-266A as well and think its wonderful, but that is about the time VIA was transitioning from budget to quality. If you had an earlier VIA board, you might be singing a different tune. Most importantly, it helps to have good information on known issues so you can avoid them. A lot of the credit for my good experience has to go to Paul's Unofficial ABIT KT7 FAQ. In the future finding a good FAQ is a prerequisite for me before I select a mobo.

AMDZone.com
Technoa.co.kr
Hardinfo.dk
Active Hardware
Ace's Hardware
Lost Circuits
Anandtech
Hexus
VIAHardware

Racksaver also announced a blade server using 132 2200+s in a 7 foot cabinet!

Also (and more to your point) few if any companies will build with just "any" component the customer specifies because of the time it would take to micro-test each configuration for hardware/software/driver conflicts. There's no way to anticipate every possible problem (not all of which are known, or if known then well-documented) for every component combination. People who home-build often spend weeks querying forums and scrutinizing manufacturer FAQ's -- ask anyone who's tried to enable all the cool features on their Abit KT7-A RAID motherboard. It's just more than a real business would have time for. Better to stick with known parts and supply a CD with drivers known to work.

For the same reason, I wouldn't recommend having your machine built by a friendly enthusiast, unless you're confident they'll be available for substantial support on the chance trouble arises. Any twit can plug the parts together, but that's where the hard part typically begins.

Try the shuttle ss40.

Unfortunately I dont think it is available quite yet, even though its sister the ss50 is available.

Maybe this will encourage new Linux for Dreamcast work with the greater possibilities it presents for a small SH6 based web server?

Good features:
Fanless operation
Eq to Pentium 533 (&lt 10db?)
integrated decent graphics with iDCT compensation for DVD
ATA-33/66/100 support
10/100 Mbps Ethernet
MC 97 Fax/Modem
TV-Out (S-video)
1394
USB 2.0
AC 97 codec
Compact package

Quiet HDTV home entertainment with following add-ons:
Ultra-quiet DVD drive
160G HD
HDTV Card
Decent 5.1 sound card
Roll your own software
Estimated cost $900

Connected to a 5.1 receiver w/speakers, this gives you a good sytem which plays all music formats, DVD player, acts as a DVR (for both NTSC and HDTV formats, &gt 40 hrs.), file server, reasonable gaming.

Gerry
my $0.02

Manufacturer's page
Review1
Review2
Review3

with pics too ..
ViaHardware

More here.

At least the show this machine using a REAL OS!!!

I don't know the ins and outs of the whole issue - I do know that according to ABIT, Msft didn't let them pass with their KT7 board or any of their newer boards.

I owned one -- and tried to disable ACPI on it. I called abit because I couldn't find a setting in the BIOS for it, and they said that to be Msft certified you couldn't include it.

They pointed me to this BIOS editor to be able to edit the choices in my BIOS and re-enable the option. --from Paul's unofficial ABIT MOBO Page: (I know it sounds shady, but check it out if you don't think it's legit..):

"None of the new Abit BIOS versions support the disabling of ACPI through the BIOS, as this functionality has been hidden. This is because this is a prerequisite for any mainboard submitted for Microsoft WHQL approval."

Where are you getting your information that Microsoft is OK with disabling ACPI? IMHO, Microsoft and open *anything* don't get along very well..

I don't know the ins and outs of the whole issue - I do know that according to ABIT, Msft didn't let them pass with their KT7 board or any of their newer boards.

I owned one -- and tried to disable ACPI on it. I called abit because I couldn't find a setting in the BIOS for it, and they said that to be Msft certified you couldn't include it.

They pointed me to this BIOS editor to be able to edit the choices in my BIOS and re-enable the option. --from Paul's unofficial ABIT MOBO Page: (I know it sounds shady, but check it out if you don't think it's legit..):

"None of the new Abit BIOS versions support the disabling of ACPI through the BIOS, as this functionality has been hidden. This is because this is a prerequisite for any mainboard submitted for Microsoft WHQL approval."

Where are you getting your information that Microsoft is OK with disabling ACPI? IMHO, Microsoft and open *anything* don't get along very well..

Maybe this Abit trick for a similar 'disable hidden' problem will work with Soyo boards?

"None of the new Abit BIOS versions support the disabling of ACPI through the BIOS, as this functionality has been hidden. Abit's own support site reports that this is because this is a prerequisite for any mainboard submitted for Microsoft WHQL approval. However, if you are desperate for this option, then it is in fact still available with the KT7 BIOS releases, but you must use a utility called modbin6 to modify the BIOS options to unhide this feature. This is a simple exercise. Instructions for using modbin6 are here. Needless to say, you risk corrupting your system by modifying a BIOS file yourself and flashing the machine. I recommend you prepare an emergency floppy disk as described in "I flashed my BIOS and now the machine is dead. What can I do?" below. You therefore do this at your own risk. Note that after disabling ACPI in the BIOS, Windows will need to redetect all your hardware!"

Here's the link (12th item down):
http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/faqbios.html

My Abit KT7-RAID had the option hidden as well, and it wasn't until I enabled it so that I could turn off ACPI that my system finally got stable, even with win2k. I found Paul's KT7 FAQ invaluable. Specifically this item.

My Abit KT7-RAID had the option hidden as well, and it wasn't until I enabled it so that I could turn off ACPI that my system finally got stable, even with win2k. I found Paul's KT7 FAQ invaluable. Specifically this item.

It's been a WHQL requirement for years. I don't know about this motherboard, but on ABIT and Shuttle boards you can re-enable the ACPI option by flashing a modified BIOS. Yeah it's a little risky, but the program that edits the BIOS file is made by Award - it's the same program the MB manufacturers use to enable and disable other options.

Read here. Personally I don't think you should boycott SOYO, Abit, or any other manufacturer because they wanted to get WHQL..

Now I really, truly, mean no offense to your operating system when I say this. I don't write OS'es, and yes I have no idea how hard it is to write the low level code. But, the PCI spec has been around for close to ten years, and shared IRQ's have always been a (optional) capability for PCI devices. Initial devices had problems with shared IRQ's. But today with no ISA, and card manufacturers learning to play nice, shared IRQ's are a reality. Shouldn't your OS support them by now? I have 2 network cards, SCSI, and sound on the same IRQ right now, and it works fine in Red Hat 7.2 and Windows XP.

ACPI has been disabled on the last 5 or so motherboards I've seen (work computers I've built, etc..) It hasn't been much of a problem (other than incompatibilities with sucky sound blaster audigy drivers) but then again, I don't run linux.

Yes, it's required for XP-- and it was greatly encouraged for 2000 Pro-- ironically, turning ACPI off fixed a lot of problems I was having with my KT7A-RAID board.

New bios revisions of existing boards sometimes disable this, so watch out!

Some more popular motherboards have "hacks" that can add this functionality back.
Try looking for an "unofficial" support forum for Soyo or whatever.

Go here for the best KT7 faq which answers all these questions for that board, but provides interesting ACPI info, as well.

There's a bunch of other good reviews of the set in all its forms and splendor.


Digit-Life
HardOCP
AnandTech
AMDDb
Via Hardware


</karmawhoring>

I agree completely about VIA's stability problems. Out of all the computers I've had based on VIA chipsets (about 4 or so), the only one with a decent amount of stability was the ASUS A7M266. Except for that one oddball stable board, it's been a horror story of:

• random lockups with the GeForce2 (no, it *isn't* that the power supplies are too small when they're all in the 450-550W range! :-)
• data corruption problems with the infamous 686B southbridge
• not being able to run CAS3 memory at 133MHz (on a Duron) (note, maybe I am just stupid, but shouldn't a 512MB CAS3 DIMM behave the same as a 128MB with respect to this?)
• conflicts with the Creative Labs SoundBlaster PCI 512, Live!, *and* Audigy, and finally
• the notorious Windows Driver Upgrade Treadmill (well, at least VIA actually *does something* about their bugs :-)

Personally, I'm terrified of VIA chipsets at this point. I like the AMD 760MP much better. :-)

You didn't mention anything about your hardware, but I had the exact same thing happen to me with the Highpoint 370 controller on a KT7-RAID motherboard. I rebooted one day to find that the HPT BIOS would say only "broken stripe." I figured my NTFS partition was toast. But there is a utility, raidrb, which I think is written by either Via or Highpoint. Anyway you just boot from a floppy and run it and it "reassures" the controller that the stripe is really ok.

http://download.viahardware.com/faq/kg7kr7/downloa ds/utils/raidrb.zip

There is some discussion of other methods to try if this one does not work in the Raid section on Paul's KT7 page. (Google search for "kt7 faq" for the url.)

We're talking lunchbox form factor!

I say 'pseudo' laptop because I don't want to mess with batteries when pretty much all the places I'd care to use a laptop there are already electrical outlets nearby. Plus how cool would it be with an old vacuum cleaner's retractable powercord?

There are plenty of little optical mice and the Happy Hacker would certainly be adequate... but I kept getting hung up on what I have heard is the most expensive part of a laptop- the display.

Most of the 4"-8" discrete LCD modules I can find (such as these) only have standard "Yellow RCA" composite video-in.

Anyone know where small LCD modules with VGA connectors can be found?

for the same price you can get a turtle beach - santa Cruz. nice linux support, and it beats the tar out of the soundblaster live in specs reliability and system stability. (SBLive is NOT PCI2.1 compliant and does leak noise onto the PCI bus. link about it here

Otherwise, couple that machine with a nice 15" Flat panel display and you have a nice Lan-party Box.

Yeah, I was looking at an SV24 and some gel-cells to replace my aging laptop. Only problem is, the on-board video doesn't have a digital output, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna run an LCD panel with analog input.

You should check out the review of the FV24 motherboard and the review of the whole system.

Plunk a high-end PCI sound card in this baby, and you're all set. Also, 3.5" drives are way cheaper than 2.5", although not as shock-resistant.

Yeah, I was looking at an SV24 and some gel-cells to replace my aging laptop. Only problem is, the on-board video doesn't have a digital output, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna run an LCD panel with analog input.

You should check out the review of the FV24 motherboard and the review of the whole system.

Plunk a high-end PCI sound card in this baby, and you're all set. Also, 3.5" drives are way cheaper than 2.5", although not as shock-resistant.

This guy is right - the workaround for the problem has been about for a while. For more information on the problem take a look at the Via Hardware FAQ. The whole via problem has been known about for sometime (a search on Kernel Traffic for KT133 turned up a few references. The most recent reference was 2.4 Kernel freezes on VIA KT133.

As mentioned in other comments, motherboard makers were encouraged to workaround this at bios level.

What's wrong with the Live!? It pollutes the PCI bus with noise, which is why it's a frequent source of PCI DMA I/O corruption, particularly (but not exclusively) on VIA chipset boards. I've found the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz to be an excellent, trouble-free replacement, and best of all Red Hat Linux autoconfigures it (zero human intervention required). See the SCFAQ on VIA Hardware.

I couldn't figure out why my HDTV card was locking up every hour or so on my KT133 board, nor why WinXP was crashing frequently on my KT266 board. Removing the Live!'s fixed both systems. I didn't bother attempting a Live! on my new KT266A.

Past Creative cards (including my SB Live! Value) have caused data corruption when copying large files across the IDE bus as well as hissing and popping during mp3 playback. This problem affects at least the VIA 686B on my FIC AZ11E board. You can find out more information about the problem here.

AMD Zone gives this summary at the end of its review: "No architectural or marketing changes with this release ... expect the previous CPUs to decline in price ... expect a bit higher performance and power consumption."

Anandtech agrees, saying the chip will not offer any significant extra performance over the 1800+, so early adopters need not sweat too much about being left behind. The site believes that AMD is currently the performance leader on desktop processors.

VIAHardware.com reckons users could be just as well off picking up the 1800+ at 1.53GHz and simply overclocking it to 1.6GHz. Users already owning a high-speed XP chip are better off waiting for the next upgrade on the platform to significantly increase performance.

Tech Report has some extensive benchmarking, putting the 1900+ slightly ahead of Intel's P4 2.0GHz in most of them, while SimHQ.com gets very excited about the new chip.

Amdmb.com also has a piece showing the expected five to six per cent performance increase.

There other reviews of this 1.6GHz processor at AnandTech and at AMD Zone and at VIA Hardware. Check them out.

I agree -- 64C sounds too high. Here is a good article on the subject from Via Hardware.

I recommend the following three steps to cool it down:

1. Run H.ODA's WPCREDIT/WCPRSET and set the ACPI HALT cooling on, if your processor is running at under 1.33 GHz or if you're not running Win2K. This will keep your idle temperature down. See the end of the VIA Hardware article for the admonition about CPU speed and Win2K stability.
2. Use Arctic Silver II thermal paste. I bought some at Fry's and it's pretty cheap. It brought the temperature down 2-3C under load.
3. Try the NoiseControl Silverado fan, if it fits in your face. North Americans no longer have to buy it from Germany, as Plycon sells it in the US now.

I have a 1.2GHz Athlon which I run at about 1.35GHz by upping the FSB. My IWill KK266 board claims that it idles at 26C, and it gets up around 41C during heavy use, and 49C in a tight loop.

I have a shutoff at 50C, which it last reached when Outlook went into a tight loop overnight. I ran a program called MBM to check on it, and it recommended a program called Shutdown Now to shut down and power off in case of alarm. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed that Shutdown Now was nagware, and my system was up all night at 50C, sending me pages every 5 minutes. When I got to work in the morning, there was a pop-up dialog saying to please send in $15 to them before it would shut off my computer. Talk about lame! It would have been fine to nag a boot time, not not at shutdown time! I'm just glad the program didn't fry my CPU. Anyway, I replaced it with the NT Resource Kit program called shutdown.exe that took a little bit of mousing around to get into MBM's configuration, but no way was I going to give money to the guy who almost fried my computer.

I agree -- 64C sounds too high. Here is a good article on the subject from Via Hardware.

I recommend the following three steps to cool it down:

1. Run H.ODA's WPCREDIT/WCPRSET and set the ACPI HALT cooling on, if your processor is running at under 1.33 GHz or if you're not running Win2K. This will keep your idle temperature down. See the end of the VIA Hardware article for the admonition about CPU speed and Win2K stability.
2. Use Arctic Silver II thermal paste. I bought some at Fry's and it's pretty cheap. It brought the temperature down 2-3C under load.
3. Try the NoiseControl Silverado fan, if it fits in your face. North Americans no longer have to buy it from Germany, as Plycon sells it in the US now.

I have a 1.2GHz Athlon which I run at about 1.35GHz by upping the FSB. My IWill KK266 board claims that it idles at 26C, and it gets up around 41C during heavy use, and 49C in a tight loop.

I have a shutoff at 50C, which it last reached when Outlook went into a tight loop overnight. I ran a program called MBM to check on it, and it recommended a program called Shutdown Now to shut down and power off in case of alarm. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed that Shutdown Now was nagware, and my system was up all night at 50C, sending me pages every 5 minutes. When I got to work in the morning, there was a pop-up dialog saying to please send in $15 to them before it would shut off my computer. Talk about lame! It would have been fine to nag a boot time, not not at shutdown time! I'm just glad the program didn't fry my CPU. Anyway, I replaced it with the NT Resource Kit program called shutdown.exe that took a little bit of mousing around to get into MBM's configuration, but no way was I going to give money to the guy who almost fried my computer.

As mentioned in the Via Hardware article, there is this review of just the motherboard. $320 isn't a bad entry point for a fully functional computer.

I'm wondering about its usefulness as a video machine / server of some sort (from the hardware side... not going to touch the software side HERE).

Internal space, at least in this particular case, would limit you to a single drive. The larger disk bay you'd probably want to use with a cd-r writer/dvd reader. For my single card slot, I'd choose an ATI All-In-Wonder because it does capture/tuner functions, and svideo out. But unfortunately, I think the PCI bus speed (+/- 33mhz) may cramp things. I haven't done the math yet.

The built-in ethernet is a major plus. Too bad the built in sound doesn't have RCA output.

Anyhow, at this point, I don't think anyone cares. But I'm looking to build a box with capture, playback, dvd rip, cdromwrite, net capabilities. Don't care if it'll cost more than a TiVo. I want to get the software written.

Windows has no trouble with them

Try reading viahardware sometime - no end of people with problems with KT133A systems, on Windows too!

My own KT7A-RAID was extremely flaky with more than one IDE device in it until I tweaked it a lot - new BIOS, different soundcard, new 4-in-1 drivers, PCI bus settings... all sorts of things.

It now runs Win2k and SuSE 7.2 with no trouble at all.

For more info about this, read this.

Lalalalala. Works fine for me...

No. The VIA problems are believed to be a harware issue. The VIA chipset is suspect. New buyers should beware not to buy boards with the VIA chipsets. Does someone have an accurate list of the chipsets believed to be errant?

There was a post from the 2.4.6 release announcement that I found interesting. Strangely the "drivers" mentioned are obviously Windows drivers but the fact that software claims to fix the problem and the bios update are worth investigating.

Re:Troubles (Score:1)
by dlapine (lapine @ uiuc . edu)

The fix is simple. Grab the latest the via drivers set, 4in132 and install it. There may also be a bios update that fixes this problem as well.

The problem was: copy 100 megs in 1 or more files at a time from one ide drive to another drive. system locks hard, requireing a reset at least, and sometimes a power cycle. You know that its fixed when it doesn't do this again.

Small tip: grab and install the via busmaster drivers 3011 as well, selecting the miniport option. This lets windows "see" the correct info about your harddrives (i.e. IBM DTLA 305020 is reported as such and not "drive type 47") without any performance hits.

These files are available at:

http://www.viahardware.com

Well, not exactly wrong :)

The bigger problem is finding out what exactly is wrong. The only information available so far has been reverse engineered (AFAIK) and posted on the 3rd party site viahardware.com. So far all the information we have is "before BIOS update X" and "after BIOS update X" snapshots of the system setup.

It's pretty easy to figure out real quick which systems are broken. It's tougher to figure out what is broken, and what the right fix is.

Jeff

Courtesy of ViaHardware, comes this link: http://www.viatech.com/products/KN133.htm.

The chipset is called KN133 (basically a mobile KT133), and offers PowerNow support as well as integrated Savage4 graphics, but no DDR-DRAM. DDR-DRAM is offered only by the mobile ALi MaGiK1 chipset, which so far seems to offer underwhelming performance, and has not been included in any of the current release of Athlon 4-powered notebooks.