Lake District Architect Computer Suppliers List

	Current List of our (UK) Preferred Suppliers for Components for building the office PCs. (Build aim is for reliability rather than outright speed)	August 2001
This list is the result of long and hard-won experience but it is constantly reviewed. Any observations welcome. For hardware reviews that are more comparative try Toms Hardware Guide or the (British) BXBoards.com
Motherboards	Asus - changed now from the old P2B series which has been a solid performer to the CUSL2 with the Intel 815E chipset - excellent BIOS update support on website.
Cases	We keep changing these but we have had a few from Novatech and Simply in the UK with no trouble from even the cheapest ones (i.e. from the included power supply). Some interesting heavy duty gear appearing on the British overclocker's site overclockers.co.uk. Recently we have upped the spec to 300W because of the power requirements of the Geforce cards and the best value has been a full tower case from Aopen sold by Dabs.com You probably only need the 300W if you are using an AMD Athlon chip but the extra overhead probably does no harm.
Graphics	Matrox - tops for 2D image quality and (usually) stability. Excellent support on their website for drivers for older cards including BIOS updates. Recently changed for 3D work to the Elsa Gladiac Geforce 2 GTS 32Mb. The OpenGL drivers are far better than many 'professional' CAD cards sold for PC use - including Elsa's own Synergy II. August 2001 Now upgraded to Elsa Gloria III for my main CAD machine.
Hard disk drives	Currently IBM and Maxtor. (Past failures with Seagate and Fujitsu.) SCSI or IDE drives? Well IDE for cost but under NT4 and Win2k SCSI is the pro's choice. Latest choice are IBM Deskstar 75XGP drives. They are ATA100 but you will need an updated '.inf' file from Intel to make this work under Windows 2000 (see IBM storage site). (August 2001 update SP2 for Windows 2000 fixes this) Adaptec for SCSI cards rather than integrated on motherboard.
CD drives/r/rw	Philips - not always the fastest perhaps but rugged construction and very reliable.
DVD ram drive	Panasonic - no particular reason other than the 101E ('U' in USA) model has been around a while and is very reliable. Be aware that the NT4 drivers shipped by Panasonic do not work (!) and I found it necessary to pay those nice people at Software Architects Inc. for proper drivers. Runs fine under Win98 though with the supplied drivers. Present capacity of 2.6 Gb per side on a double sided disk. One 'gotcha' is that for normal backups you would probably use Fat16 formatting which limits disks to 2.1Gb per side. Note [03/11/2000] Software Architects new DVDWrite Pro software allows FAT32 and (better) UDF formatting under Win98/ME/NT/2000. Also new Pansonic drive doubles capacity at same price and is backwards compatible with older disks (they say).
Tape Drives and Backup	I have used both HP and Seagate - both good - if you still need tape. I currently back up the network to DVD ram disk using Backup Plus - a shareware product from Avantrix.
Processors	Following a long wait for a decent chipset from Intel the 815E has arrived and I have stuck with the Pentium III for the moment. It seems that OpenGL and graphics drivers generally are better written for the Intel chips than for the superior floating point performance of the AMD Athlon. There are issues of power consumption with Geforce 2 cards and Athlon motherboards. There is a good guide to this on the Elsa site under 'FAQs'. Toms Hardware is a better source of information than the chip suppliers' sites.
Network Cards and hubs	3Com - other 'well known' brands are probably OK too. Avoid cheap cards as they can cause almost as much trouble as graphics cards (see above). For cabling always use Category 5 or 5E cable. As I am now running Windows 2000 I am using the latest 3Com 3CR990-TX-97 pci network cards - they are expensive but are 10/100 rated and designed for Windows 2000.
Sound Card	Creative Labs of course - even the most basic is OK. If you are serious about music try Yamaha. Soundblaster 16 pci is compatible with Windows 2000 and is reasonably priced.
Operating System	Microsoft Windows 2000 - admittedly not everyone's cup of tea but for anyone who has used NT4 over the last few years it is a joy! Check hardware compatibility list before buying any new components or upgrading. For business use a Microsoft Technet CD subscription is a must. Keep a copy of Windows 98 handy if you have programmes that refuse to run under NT4/Win2k (and to allow you to make DOS bootable floppies so that you can flash upgrade your motherboard/graphics card BIOS.) Always install 2 copies of NT4/Win2K to different partitions - and just in case I always make the boot partition FAT rather than NTFS. Always install Diskeeper from Execsoft for defragmentation on a frequent basis (Their emailed newsletter is a brilliant source of hints and tips on running NT/Win2k) Version 6 has smart scheduling. (Nov 2000 the Germans have objected to the inclusion of the basic Diskeeper within Windows 2000 because the CEO of Execsoft is a member of a certain cult! Microsoft has posted a means of removing it on their German support site - weird!).
Peripherals	Monitors - Nokia (Quality! - older FST tubes on Pro series better than latest Flat ones) - Sony if you can afford the top of the range stuff. Routers - Lucent Technologies/Network Alchemy (Quality with style! - good email support) Printers/plotters - Hewlett-Packard (the rest should give up!) Scanners - Agfa (all much of a muchness these days but Agfa have a good pedigree) Mice - Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer (both flash and useful) Keyboards - Keytronic and Cherry although I quite like the new Microsoft Internet Keyboards (get the 'pro' model though)