November Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 8

Price Round Up

The Intel System

Case: Cooler Master TAC-T01 Wave Master- $125
PSU: Antec 480W NeoPower Power Supply - $110
CPU: Pentium 4-3.4 GHz Extreme Edition Processor LGA775 Retail - $999
Cooling: Included - $0
Motherboard: DFI LANPARTY 875P-T Retail - $168
Memory: Corsair XMS 1GB PC-3200Pro TWINX1024-3200LLPRO (2x512) - $325
Hard Drive: Two Western Digital 74GB SATA, 10000 RPM w/ 8-MB Cache - $356
Video Card: eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256-MB - $520
Monitor: NEC/Mitsubishi DP2070SB-BK 22" Diamondtron Monitor - $602
Sound Card: Creative SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum - $167
Speakers: Logitech Z-680 5.1 - $219
CD/DVD-RW: Pioneer 16x DVD+RW/-RW DVR-108 OEM - $72
NIC: Included - $0
Modem: US Robotics External v.92 USB Performance Pro Faxmodem - $43
Mouse: Logitech MX1000 Optical Mouse - $65
Keyboard: Microsoft Multimedia Natural Keyboard OEM - $22
Gamepad: Saitek P3000 Wireless Pad - $31
Operating System: Windows XP Pro w/ SP2 - $129
UPS: CyberPower OfficePower 825VA CPS825AVR - $90
Floppy: Generic Black Floppy Disk Drive - $8

Total: $4,051

The AMD System

Case: Cooler Master TAC-T01 Wave Master - $125
PSU: Antec 480W NeoPower Power Supply - $110
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 Socket 939 OEM - $835
Cooling: Thermalright SLK-948U w/Vantec Stealth 92mm FAN - $47
Motherboard: ASUS A8V Deluxe WiFi Edition - $130
Memory: Corsair XMS 1GB PC-3200Pro TWINX1024-3200LLPRO (2x512) - $325
Hard Drive: Two Western Digital 74GB SATA, 10000 RPM w/ 8-MB Cache - $356
Video Card: eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256-MB - $520
Monitor: NEC/Mitsubishi DP2070SB-BK 22" Diamondtron Monitor - $602
Sound Card: Creative SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum - $167
Speakers: Logitech Z-680 5.1 - $219
CD/DVD-RW: Pioneer 16x DVD+RW/-RW DVR-108 OEM - $72
NIC: Included - $0
Modem: US Robotics External v.92 USB Performance Pro Faxmodem - $43
Mouse: Logitech MX100 Optical Mouse - $65
Keyboard: Microsoft Multimedia Natural Keyboard OEM - $22
Gamepad: Saitek P3000 Wireless Pad - $31
Operating System: Windows XP Pro w/ SP2 - $129
UPS: CyberPower OfficePower 825VA CPS825AVR - $90
Floppy: Generic Black Floppy Disk Drive - $8

Total: $3,896

Closing Remarks

This month, both of our Extreme systems underwent a serious overhaul and came out with higher performance and better features. We were able to upgrade both the AMD and Intel CPUs this month, bringing AMD ahead of Intel in terms of overall gaming performance. We were also able to finally include a NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra, which has remained very elusive up until this point. We are just one step away from finally moving to PCI Express on both systems. As soon as we can get our hands on a high-end PCI Express graphics card at equivalent-to-AGP price, and an nForce4 motherboard for the AMD side, we will be in business, but until then our best bet was to stay with AGP.

As clock frequency from both AMD and Intel have hit an impasse, it is unlikely we are going to see any drastic increases in base CPU speed over the short term. As a result, we should see dual core chips from both AMD and Intel finally becoming a reality within the next few months. New hard drive technologies such as Serial-ATA2 and Native Command Queuing should significantly improve performance over the current iteration of SATA hard drives. However, perhaps the most exciting new technology of all it NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI, which brings back memories of the old Voodoo2 SLI days, and two GeForce 6800 Ultra PCI Express cards working in tandem should be interesting.

* Please note that the prices in our guide do not include shipping costs or taxes. The final system price also reflects a "best case" scenario of finding an online vendor that stocks the majority of internal components, or having access to a number of local computer retailers for system quotes and comparison shopping.