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Sharky Extreme : Monthly Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide |
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Monthly Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide |
March 2004 Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 3By Ryan "Speedy" Wissman March 26, 2004
Intel's 875P is the fastest, most feature-packed chipset currently available for Pentium 4 systems. Geared toward high-end users, it supports an 800 MHz FSB, dual-channel DDR400, Hyper Threading, USB 2.0, and also has integrated RAID support. The chipset also includes integrated PAT (Performance Acceleration Technology) which boosts memory performance, something that the 865PE does not. Without a doubt, an i875P-based motherboard is the best candidate for extreme platform performance on the Intel side.
The ABIT IC7-MAX3 has been our favorite Intel motherboard for the past couple of months, and with good reason. This motherboard has enough onboard features to please just about anybody, and has excellent performance and stability. The motherboard includes four SATA ports, an AGP Pro slot, Intel CSA Gigabit LAN, and a number of other hot technologies built-in. ABIT has taken the initiative to throw out all legacy connectors with their "MAX" boards, to make room for additional USB, audio and Firewire connecters. In addition to the usual BIOS tweaking and overclocking features the board also has an OTES style cooling system right above the CPU to keep everything running smoothly.
Current Cost: $194
The Athlon 64 FX's package uses a 940-pin configuration, which means that motherboards designed for the Athlon 64 will not work with the FX and visa versa. Our current favorite Athlon 64 FX board is the ASUS SK8V. It features VIA's newest chipset, the VIA K8T800, which currently has the highest overall performance in its class. ASUS has a long history of producing quality boards for both Intel and AMD systems, and the SK8V is just another notch on their belt. In addition to excellent performance and stability, the VIA K8T800 chipset has an incredible array of onboard features. You can't go wrong including a 3COM 3C940 Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, Firewire, 6-channel audio and Serial ATA RAID. In addition, the board supports dual-channel registered memory, and takes full advantage of AMD's scalable HyperTransport between integrated circuits. The ASUS SK8V is without a doubt one of the best Athlon 64 FX motherboard's currently available, making it a perfect choice for this guide.
Both Corsair and Kingston are among the top memory manufacturers, and both offer some high performance, rock solid DDR options. Corsair's XMS line and Kingston's HyperX series are two of the top performers when it comes to enthusiast level memory. This time around we chose different memory manufacturers for each system as it allowed us better flexibility in terms of price, performance and compatibility. The Intel and the AMD system also require very different types of DDR memory, and each manufacturer is better suited in some respects than the other when it came time to make our decision.
The Intel and AMD systems in this guide make use of dual-channel DDR memory, however, due to the different architectures; we need two different types of DDR memory. The Intel system makes use of unbuffered DDR, while the AMD system requires registered DDR memory for proper operation. For the Intel machine we picked 1-GB (2x512-MB) of Corsair's popular and reliable TwinX1024-3200LL memory, as it offers the best price-to-performance ratio and the "low latency" format offers very low memory timings.
For the AMD system, we went with Kingston HyperX PC3200 registered error correction code (ECC) memory, which is considerably more expensive than non buffered memory. The Kinston memory offered better compatibility with our system than Corsair's comparable registered memory. The Kingston 1GB (2x512-MB) HyperX package ensures that you receive a pair of matched memory modules that will operate seamlessly in dual-channel format.
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