Build Blog - ASUS AT3N7A-I Mini-ITX Motherboard

[Meester.Rip]

CASE - Antec ISK 300. IT comes with a 65 watt PSU and from the reviews I read that should be enough power.

Case Fan - ENERMAX UC-8EB 80mm. The reviews are good and a review of the case suggested this brand. I wonder if I can run the system fanless with these case fans.

I have 2 1 gig DDR2 800 sticks of ram at home already. I think that will be good for W7 Pro.

Now I am waiting to see what Fry's has on sale as far as SSDs this Friday. In the mean time I think I have a 300 gig drive to put in to see how well the case does with removing heat.

[shadymg]

very respectable start :-) don't you love how *free* winnings end up costing so much? :-P

[Meester.Rip]

It did give me a reason to dig out old pcs to sell for parts money.

[Meester.Rip]

The board has arrived. Thanks. The newegg box tripped me up when I saw it. I was hoping all the parts would arrive today. I have stash of them for shipping parts also.

[Meester.Rip]

I put it all together today with a 300gb HDD sitting next to the case. It runs W7 as snappy as a 2.8P4 I have upstairs and once I get an SSD in there I think it will be even better. The CPU fan is really loud. I think I'll be disabling that and test running the case with just the two 80mm fans. I did run into a problem with the power led being 3 pins and the header only having two. but the light would just be annoying so I am not worried about that. I'll be getting a Kingston SSD tomorrow and then it should be complete. I wont' be throwing a slim optical drive in unless BD drives get down under 100. But it really doesn't need one seeign as I can access everything off of the network. I need a Kill-a-watt tester to see how may watts it does pull. If I have enough headroom I might get a low profile PCI tuner or just go with USB.

[Meester.Rip]

I swapped out the 300GB drive for the 128GB SSD from Kingston. I reinstalled Win7 because I thought it would change the services it installed to run by default when it had an SSD. I didn't notice anything missing. I still had to disable defrag. One thing I did try that was recomended was to disable the page file, well I guess you need a lot of ram for this because when trying to play a blu-ray movie I would get an out of memory error. So I re-enabled the paging file and the error went away.

Since I don't have a second HD TV in the house I am running the VGA out via an adapter to S-Video to use the box on my Wega. So far everything works fine.

With the two enermax 80mm installed I was able to disable the CPU fan which was crazy loud. No problems so far. The ASUS probe shows the temps to be about the same as wehn the CPU Fan was on. I think the highest I have seen the temps were around 35c.

I still can't seem to get the Bluetooth to work.

[WAIcool]

lurking and reading, interesting thread...

One thing I did try that was recomended was to disable the page file, well I guess you need a lot of ram for this because when trying to play a blu-ray movie I would get an out of memory error. So I re-enabled the paging file and the error went away.

I am curious to know if you tried setting your page file so the initial size and maximum size are equal and set to the maximum size allowed.  my system for instance has both settings at 4092 MB.  This supposedly maintains a constant page file size and limits the number of times windows writes to the hd/ssd.  I am not playing blu-ray yet nor do i have an ssd (you're very fortunate), so it would be interesting to know if this "constant-max" virtual memory configuration would help or even work.

[Meester.Rip]

I am sure it would work. But I was hoping to avoid the frequent writing to the drive. I might just keep an eye out for a 4Gb kit and then do away with the page file.

[babgvant]

With the two enermax 80mm installed I was able to disable the CPU fan which was crazy loud.

The stock fan is an abomination!  Glad you got it working w/o

I still can't seem to get the Bluetooth to work.

Has ASUS published a Win7 driver?

[Meester.Rip]

I don't know about the driver. I am not to concerned yet. It just gives me more options for a cordless keyboard in the future.

[jurcx]

"Since I don't have a second HD TV in the house I am running the VGA out via an adapter to S-Video to use the box on my Wega. So far everything works fine."

What kind of adapter are you using? Model and maybe link to the shop.

I have two different adapters and no one works? dont know why

[Meester.Rip]

www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Presentation-Converter-VGA-Video-TV-PC85/dp/B002CMAW20/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1260039254&sr=8-10
It isn't perfect but it gets the job done.

[jurcx]

And how does your HPTC operate with the CPU fan off? Do you have any havy load on it, FULL HD, games, ...?
Is it completley no need for a fan?

[jurcx]

One more question.
I am trying to install Windows 7 on Kingston SSDNow disk 64GB and the windows installation program recognize the disk but I can not make partition or anything else.

Very strange. I also try Vista and the same problem. Do I have to do anything in BIOS. The sam motherborad ASUS AT3N7A-I.

"... cannot create partition ..."

[Skirge01]

Do those drives use jumpers for firmware updates?  I have a Patriot Torqx which won't get recognized if you leave the jumpers for the firmware update on the pins.