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Hardware Installation
The first job is to open up the Pundit and take out the various removable parts. ASUS have done quite a nice job in the design of the Pundit which means that even though the space inside the machine is limited, you can still fit components quite easily. This is mainly due to the removable bays for the drives and for the PCI cards.
I removed the PCI card bay first. I'm not putting any PCI cards into the machine, but I wanted to remove this to get to one of the motherboard jumpers below it (see section below) and also to get to where the audio cable from the DVD drive plugs into. The PCI card bay lifts out nice and easily with no trouble at all. Removing the drive bay is also easy, just unscrewing three screws and lifiting out. Removing the processor heat-sink-fan unit is easy enough although take care with the underside of it... mine has some thermal paste on the bottom which you need to be careful not to touch and don't put it down on a surface with that side down...
I had a look through the manual and there are only a few jumpers on this motherboard - most things can be configured using the BIOS setup. None of the jumpers looked interesting apart from a couple of the jumpers under the 'USB device wakeup' section in the ASUS manual. I don't think that I'm going to be able to get the Pundit to wakeup using a USB remote control, but I thought that I would enable these jumpers on the off-chance that it will be possible. The jumpers that I enabled were USBPWR12 and USBPWR34. I enabled both of these jumpers to the '+5VSB' setting as detailed in the manual.
Installing the CPU and memory is pretty straight forward as you would imagine. The memory has to be installed first really, or at least before putting on the CPU heatsink/fan assembly as the memory slots are awkward to get to when that is in place. There are two slots for memory and I couldn't find any indication in the manual as to whether either of the slots was preferred when you have just one memory card. I put mine in the slot closest to the case, the furthest from the CPU but I doubt it matters. Fitting the CPU was easy enough although I had to push down on the chip a little bit to get it to click into place so that it was fully in the socket on all sides. Once that was done it was a simple case of closing the socket lever and replacing the heat sink/fan assembly.
The Pundit has only one IDE channel and so both the DVD drive and the hard disk must be connected to that channel using one cable, which is supplied. The positioning of everything means that the DVD drive will be connected to the end of the cable and the hard disk will be connected to the connector mid-way down the cable. If you use the 'cable select' jumper option on the drives this would mean that the DVD drive would become the 'master' and the hard disk would become the 'slave' which is probably not what we want. Therefore I set the jumpers on the hard disk to its 'master' setting and the DVD drive jumpers to its 'slave' setting. Fitting of the drives is made very easy because of the removable drive bay in the Pundit. Once this has been taken out it is very easy to slot in the drives and screw them into place before placing it back into the Pundit. Once the drives are placed in the drive bay you will not be able to see any markings on the tops of the drives anymore so it's important to get any information that might be on there such as jumper positions before putting them into the drive bay. Once the drives have been placed into the drive bay it's a simple matter of connecting the IDE cable and replacing the drive bay back into the Pundit. I also connected the audio cable from the DVD drive to its connector on the motherboard.
During the boot sequence my Pundit declares its BIOS version as:
I had a look on the ASUS website to see if there was an updated version of the BIOS, but there wasn't at the time I'm writing this. I went through the whole of the BIOS setup utility, but there were only a few things that I changed:
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