The Royal Line

By Jerry Pournelle

April 21, 2003

(The Royal Line :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 273 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Bringing Up Anastasia

I built Anastasia in an Antec Performance Series SX1040B SOHO File Server case Antec sent a couple of months ago. It was that or a normal small tower case. I had two reasons for going with the larger case. First, after examining the serious thermal protection system Intel sent with that 3 GHz/800 FSB Pentium 4 I thought there might be some heat dissipation problems. Not only is there the fast CPU chip, but there will be two Barracuda 120 GB drives, and in my experience those high speed Barracuda drives can get hot.

I've since learned that's no longer true; while the older Barracuda drives could bake eggs while you transferred data files, the latest 7200 Barracuda's are quiet and cool; Bob Thompson calls them "about the coolest 7200 ATA drives you can get," and certainly the pair I have in Anastasia haven't produced any significant heat.

I also I have a number of assets like a new Plextor PX-504A DVD +R/+RW drive that go into the new machine, and those will add heat as well. The SX1040B has two exhaust fans and a 4oo Watt power supply, which I thought certainly ought to be good enough, and it has been. The case is big, but I have room, and heat can be a problem in summer.

Assembling the system was easy enough, barring the usual problem of getting a couple of the motherboard screws started. Cases have lips and flanges that seem designed to get in the way of a screwdriver long enough to reach the screws holding the motherboard down. The infuriating part is when one of those screws gets cross-threaded, and you try to remove it, and the hex nut under the motherboard comes out. Now you have a loose metal part under the motherboard, and there's nothing for it but to take the whole mess apart and start over. The remedy for that is to screw those little hex risers down good and hard, preferably using a hex nut driver to do the job. That way, when you inevitably cross-thread one of the motherboard screws, you can get it loose again without having to start over.

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