Whew....I FINALLY have my system up and running again!
I've built a lot of computers and never had an ordeal like the last three days.
The power supply in the new tower I bought fried when I tried to boot with the new mobo, cpu, and DDR.
I then tried my previous tower as an interim fix but the PC wouldn't post and I thought possibly the DDR, mobo, or CPU had fried too.
It turns out that the new hardware in combination with my Adaptec 2940U/UW, 5 SCSI disks, GF2 MX400, and SBLive is VERY power hungry and 320 watts wasn't enough.
Now it all resides in a 10 bay SCSI server tower with 12 cooling fans and (2) 300 watt power supplys!
It sounds like a frigging C-130 Hercules taking off.
I bought the ECS K7S5A with SiS 735 chipset,AMD TBird 1GHZ/266, and 256mb of PC2100 DDR, great performance at a low price.
The chipset combined with DDRAM theoretically can transfer data at 2.1GB per second and also supports the next generation AMD CPUs using a 166mhz FSB.
It's not a board I would recommend to a beginner as configuring it will eat their lunch.
So far SiS is doing a pretty good job of supporting it with frequent BIOS updates/fixes but it is still a bit unstable.
Running AH I'm getting 10-15 more FPS than my Celeron 600@1008mhz produced in the bomber and the carrier stress test.
In 3DMark2001 it scored 2509 3dmarks vs the Celerons 2187 score.
In Norton Utilitys and SiSandra comparisons it doubled the Celerons rating.
Not bad for approximately $169.00 US. <including shipping> Now all I need is a good video card.
