November Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 3

Motherboard

Intel Motherboard: Asus P4T533-C i850E Motherboard

Choosing the right motherboard is always tough. With many DDR based chipsets coming close to the performance of an Intel 850E/RDRAM combo, the decision to go with the Asus P4T533C was a tough one to make. However, since this is an Extreme buyer's guide, we went with a PC1066 RDRAM platform and this is one heck of a motherboard at that. It is built with legendary Asus quality, Intel's 850E chipset with 533 MHz FSB support, 4 RIMM slots (for up to 2GB of 1066 MHz RDRAM), 1 AGP 4X slot, 5 PCI slots, and 4 USB 2.0 ports. Naturally there are two IDE ports supporting up to 4 IDE drives, supporting Ultra DMA 100/66.

There are also some very nice convenience features on the motherboard, such as the ASUS EZ Flash, which enables you to update your BIOS without having to resort to the old method of using a DOS based utility and a bootable floppy disk. The motherboard also comes with the Post Reporter feature that quite literally tells you about problems and solutions via an onboard IC voice chip. Most importantly though, the motherboard supports the 533 MHz FSB that is required by the Intel Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz CPU, and it also supports 1066 MHz RDRAM for the absolute maximum memory performance. Unfortunately we were unable to get a hold of a dual channel DDR solution prior to publishing this guide, hopefully next month's guide will have a dual channel DDR option for the Intel Pentium 4 platform.

Asus A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 Motherboard

Current Cost: $155
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

The AMD platform has been yearning for a high performance solution for quite some time now. The various chipsets from, VIA, SIS, and even NVIDIA in the past have shown promise, but AMD users were always wanting more. With that in mind, this month's AMD machine can only be outfitted with the latest and greatest, and the latest and greatest is a motherboard furnished with NVIDIA's nForce2 chipset. With the nForce2 chipset in mind, we logically went with the Asus A7N8X Deluxe, reliability, and availability has always been Asus' stronger traits, so we've decided to stick with them again for the AMD system.

Starting off with the NVIDIA nForce2 chipset, the A7N8X comes with an AGP 8X port, 3 DIMM sockets (for up to 3GB of DDR), and it also has support for DDR400 DIMM. To run in dual channel DDR mode, you must install two sticks of memory into the different colored DIMM sockets. The A7N8X has onboard LAN capability, Serial ATA RAID support, and on-board sound with 5.1 audio support. Additionally, it has a dual IEEE 1394 port for a pair of fire wire devices and for increased connectivity, there is a USB 2.0 controller that allows up to four external USB 2.0 devices to be attached. Flexibility is the key with this motherboard, and it can run RAID mode 0, or 1 with the Serial ATA interface.

Serial ATA Drives are currently unavailable, but we've included converters in the storage section to allow connectivity to the Serial ATA Raid controller. The A7N8X certainly offers all the connections that an extreme user will need, and in addition to that, the motherboard has some useful features, such as the C.O.P (CPU overheating protection) feature that shuts off the machine when temperatures increase high enough to damage the system. If you're interested in overclocking, you can do it easily in the BIOS through the Stepless Frequency Selection option.

System Memory

Intel: Four 256MB PC1066 Samsung RIMMs

Current Cost: $10 X 4 = $400
Months on list: 2
Price Change: -$20

With Pentium 4's being so memory bandwidth hungry, and with the Asus P4T533C being able to take full advantage of high-end RDRAM, it was a natural decision to go with the highest grade 184-pin PC1066 RIMM. While most high-end machines are packing 512-MB of RAM, we felt that the Extreme machine should pack 1GB, so that memory upgrades will never be an issue throughout the lifecycle of this machine.

Realizing that 1GB will be enough to last for a very long time, we decided that going with the more affordable 256MB X 4 was a more viable solution than spending unneeded funds towards a 512-MB X 2 solution. The money saved would be contributed elsewhere to balance out the machine.

AMD: Two Corsair 512MB PC-3200 DDR DIMMs

Current Cost: $195 X 2 = $390
Months on list: 3
Price Change: +$10

High quality DDR memory tends to cost more than the generic type, but a pair of these 512-MB beauties from Corsair is worth it, especially with the neat looking heat spreaders that come preinstalled on each DIMM. Installing two of these sticks in the A7N8X gives the AMD Extreme machine the maximum memory performance in a Dual Channel DDR configuration. Corsair has long been known for their high quality DRAM products, so it's no surprise that we've gone to them for the AMD Extreme machine. No one wants to be stuck with generic or lower quality RAM, and for the sake of overclocking, having DDR 400 modules (PC3200) ensures that the RAM will not be the bottleneck.