BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2003
Shamanic Rituals
By Jerry Pournelle
March 24, 2003
(Shamanic Rituals
: Page 1 of 1 )
Column 272 (Continued from the Previous Week)
Shaman
The newest machine at Chaos Manor is Shaman, a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 built on an ECS L4S8A2 Mainboard with Phoenix BIOS.
You may recall I got this board and chip at a Fry's sale for less than they usually charge for the chip alone, and
installed it because I had some problems determining what was wrong with another system.
I had fully intended to replace that ECS L4S8A2 Mainboard with an Intel D845PEBT2 before installing the operating
system. I had already removed the nVIDIA GeForce 4 video board; but just before I removed the motherboard I thought it
might be a good idea to go on and set up the system. I can always rip out the motherboard another time.
On the other hand, why do that? The ECS L4S8A2 Mainboard has Front Side Bus speeds of both 400 and 533, and all the
other assets are present: FireWire, USB 2.0, Serial ATA, DDR333/DDR266 memory controller. There are three memory slots,
each capable of holding a full gigabyte. In other words, the ECS Mainboard is comparable in features to the Intel, and
costs a lot less. Hang on to that thought; we'll come back to it later.
At the moment Shaman has "only" 512 MB of Kingston memory, and a story goes with that. Once I decided to bring the
system up with the ECS L4S8A2 Mainboard still in place, I thought to install a full gigabyte of memory. I have a pair of
Crucial 512 MB memory units which are certainly fast enough for this system. I took out the Kingston memory unit and
installed the Crucial, put the video board back in, and turned on the system.
Naturally it didn't work. Sigh. I put the Kingston memory back in. It still didn't work. The reason wasn't obvious, but
I knew what it was. For some reason I have always had problems getting AGP video boards seated properly, and that was the
problem this time as well. Eventually I had to take the thing out entirely, and while it was out I rubbed its contacts
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