Visions of SIGGRAPH

By Jerry Pournelle

August 25, 2003

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Column 277 (Continued from the Previous Week)

ANTEC and Standard Systems

I confess I have become enamored of Antec cases, and I have no reason to believe their "TruePower" supplies are in any way inferior to PC Power and Cooling power supplies.

The "standard" system I now recommend is the Intel D865 motherboard with integrated Ethernet, sound and video, running as fast a chip as you feel like paying for, with at least 512 megabytes of premium—Crucial and Kingston are the only brands I currently recommend—memory. Get a good 5.1 speaker set—we have Klipsch and we love it—because the D865 supports 5.1 sound through the "smart jack" system (see the earlier column) under which the 3 standard sound jacks alternate between the usual speaker-line input-microphone to being the 3 different jacks required for a 5.1 sound system. This all works automatically, and the software comes with the motherboard, as does Intel Active Monitor.

I built one of those D865 systems in an Antec "Piano Black" finish Sonata case, and I have run it hard for several weeks. I was a little concerned because the Antec power supply in that case was their "True 380" rather than the 400 Watt I consider necessary for modern Pentium 4 systems.

My concerns were unfounded. I have four high speed disk drives—two serial and two parallel ATA (and as a matter of fact, two Maxtor and two Seagate; I recommend either of those brands, and currently no others). There's also a Sony DRU-500A DVD+-RW/+-R/CD drive. That's a fair amount of power drain, and I've also put on a Backpack DVD +RW drive through the USB-2 port, and several USB memory card readers. It all works, and Intel Active Monitor shows no variance in the power output.

One of these days I will drop in a really hot video board, but I don't expect to see any problems. I did open up the Antec True 380 to look at its components. Unlike the el cheapo power supplies you see at many stores, the components are large and rugged; perhaps not quite as much so as the PC Power and Cooling components, but you'd have to work to see the difference.

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