AMD Athlon System Test - Looking a little deeper
June 21, 2000
by Eric Svetcov
Yesterday while working on the new systems I noticed something that was a little odd. The Sparkle power supply indicated that it was only a 200W power supply. I was a little surprised so I went to AMD’s web site and checked the list of AMD Athlon recommended power supplies and found that two Sparkle power supplies are on the approved list for my system - A 250W power supply (model FSP-250-61GN) and a monster 350W unit (FSP-350-60BN). And on top of that, there isn’t one power supply in the list that is less than 235W.
Now this doesn’t concern me nearly as much as you might think. I bought the systems from a reputable dealer (Midwest Micro) and the system appears to work just fine. In the near term this seems just fine. My question (one that I will pose to Midwest Micro today) is whether I will need to upgrade the power supply when I decide to add a second hard drive, CD-ROM Writer, Firewire card or attach USB devices that are powered via the USB connection. Stay tuned, I will report back with my findings.
The second item that caused me some trouble were the monitors. I chatted with my sales rep, Brent at Midwest Micro, and he proposed an upgrade to a Viewsonic GS790. He is honoring his statement before I purchased that if I didn’t like the Futura monitors, that Midwest would pick them up for free. I merely pay the difference in cost between the Futura monitors and the Viewsonic GS790s. As I indicated in a previous article, my dealings with Brent at Midwest have been excellent - this transaction underscores a good business relationship.
By the way, about the Viewmate Futura monitors. These aren’t horrible monitors. For a home monitor or on a system that is used 2-3 hours each day, a Futura LP995 is a great bargain. For a business system where a person will stare at the monitor for 8-10 hours straight, it isn’t quite there. It’s still an excellent value, but the $50 extra that we will pay for the Viewsonic GS790 will pay off in the long run....with happier employees.
On a final note, I did reinstall the systems with a single large partition. Midwest Micro’s thought process for taking approximately 15% of the drive for a second partition was for the system files for the system installation and restore (Microsoft apparently doesn’t ship out Windows2000 media with OEM Windows 2000 licenses). This isn’t a poor decision, it’s just one I don’t like. When you start with a 20GB drive and lop off 1GB for overhead and then 3GB for the system files, you end up with only 16GB. And that really isn’t 16GB of useable space if you want your system to perform. You really ought to leave 20% of your hard drive free so that you can defragment your drive and so that files that are written to disk actually have somewhere to go (hopefully without fragmenting horribly). Before you know it, your 20GB drive has less than 13GB of useable space on the first partition. And a second partition (that most end users can’t figure out how to use) with another 2 GB of space that will probably never be used. This might be splitting hairs, but I really would rather have a 15GB drive than a 13GB drive (useable space).
I am still quite impressed by the system. They are fast and have been stable for the two days I’ve been working on them. I made one modification to the BIOS on the systems I’ve unpacked, they came with super bypass disabled, it is now enabled on all of my systems (Check out this article on Tom’s Hardware Guide for information about Super Bypass).
So far, so good with these new systems.....I’m beginning to think that AMD has a winner capable of supplying corporate IT (and at a lower price point than an equivalent Intel box). Come back to IThell.com for further discussion and evaluation.