CD and DVD Writers:
CD and DVD Writers:
My CD and DVD writer drive Research:
Been thinking about getting a CD or DVD writer drive? I did a TON of reseach on drives (32 drives and counting) and here are my results, links to media manufactures, other excellent CD sites, etc!
How CD-R, CD-R/W, DVD-ROM, and DVD
Re-writables work: Check out this HTML'ized Microsoft PowerPoint presention
from SeagateSoftware on how these technologies work and learn how DVD
re-writable is coming!
PC related information
Common cable pinouts: Including NULL
serial and NULL Parallel (DB9, DB25, RJ45, mixed), troubleshooting RS232
connections, 10/100 Ethernet (standard and cross-over), T1 cables, and more.
A quick intro and guide to overclocking PC motherboards and CPUs.
Common PC IRQ
configurations and I/O ports
A detailed spec sheet on AMI BIOS
parameters, BEEP codes, and other optimizations.
IBM AT and ATX power supplies
: Diagnose your PC's Power Supply. Here are the pinouts and
voltage levels
A short intro on the different IBM PC buses like ISA,
PCI, VLB, EISA, etc.
ATX Cases: Good Concept.. Bad Cooling!
Read up on why your ATX-based computer is running so HOT and learn
how to fix it!
Older Stuff
View Alarms: Get this software to
monitor your equiped TX or LX chipset-based motherboard for
CPU temp, CPU voltages, CPU fan speed, etc..
FastVid: Do you have a Intel
Pentium Pro, PentiumII, AMD K6, or Cyrix 6x86-based motherboard? If so,
you need to run FastVid to get the full performance from your PCI
chipset? Why? To gain faster GUI performance, these vendors dropped
some critical PCI optimizations for specific DOS-style video
read/writes. FastVid will show, up to, 200% performance gains for
things like Doom, Quake, etc. Check out this excellent URL for more
details on this problem, how to download FastVid, and get lots of good
info on video card overclocking, CPU speed tweaks, etc.
Hard Drive Technology:
Spec'ing out hard drives: All hard drives have roughly the same
performance, right? NO!
Enhanced IDE: What all the
different EIDE modes are and how they increase hard drive
performance
SCSI Termination: What all the
Why your SCSI devices might
not be working as advertised: Faulty termination. Learn how to fix
your SCSI woes!
Motherboards:
I can't emphasize enough that a good motherboard should be anyone's
#1 priority when building a machine. Why ASUS? Their CMOS setup are
one of the most flexible I've seen. They are well built, well supported,
and just plain work forever. Nuff' said.
The ASUS P2L97 Optimization and
Overclocker's Page is the results from the P2L97 Overclockers
e-mail group on tips, tricks, and optimizations for this excellent
Pentium-II motherboard.
Your BIOS and Y2K: If the system ROM is earlier than Version #401A0-0402-1,
you'll need to get a new BIOS EPROM burned for you. This system does NOT
have FLASH upgrade abilities.
Read up on my experience upgrading an ASUS GX4
motherboard to a AMD 120Mhz and DX4-133Mhz processor (happily
overclocked to 160Mhz!). The ASUS manual's jumper settings aren't
necessarily the best!!!
ASUS GX4 valid DRAM SIMM configurations
PC Motherboard Chipsets:
Dranch's quick intro to the
SIX new Triton-II (430xx) chipsets and motherboards
Inside info about Intel's upcoming
Triton-II chipset
from InfoWorld.
Quick analysis of the differences between Intel's two new Triton-II chipsets and
a technical discussion of Triton-II's abilities with EDO, ECC, and
SyncBurst cache RAM.
ATX motherboards, Side by Side
comparisons of the FX/HX/VX chipsets
Tom's Hardware Page:
PC hardware benchmarks: The good, the bad, and the ugly
Benchmark of a
ASUS TX97 MB running a AMD-K6 200Mhz at 66/75/83Mhz clockings!
#1 - Rough Norton SI
ratings of different motherboards (486/Pentium) and their configurations
#2 - Benchmarks using
Ziff Davis's PC-Bench v9.0 of various machines
Last Updated: 04/20/07