AMD Viper Athlon Mainboard with Updated 8/2/99 BIOS Support
256MB of EMS HSDRAM (operating at 100MHz FSB)
18.1GB Western Digital 7,200rpm UDMA/66 HD
Kenwood 52X TrueX CD-ROM
Sound Blaster Live! PCI Audio Card

Lots of ram is always good for benchmark results, as is a good PCI card like the Sound Blaster Live!. The motherboard was a no brainer, simply because, of the three Athlon capable mainboards Sharky Extreme currently possesses, the most recent BIOS update belonged to the AMD-manufactured board.

Installing the newest Hercules Dynamite TNT2 driverset (based off NVIDIA's 2.08 detonator reference drivers) and the rest of the peripherals brought us to the question of which case to utilize for this beast.

Just because the Athlon 650 CPU wasn't overclocked in this particular PC didn't mean we could skimp on the airflow capacity of the case we chose, because the Dynamite video card was highly overclocked itself and thus needed as much air support as we could give it.

We ended up choosing a free flowing case from Enlight, the 7230.

The 7230 is a mid-tower ATX design that has solid construction and several drilled holes in both the front and the back of the chassis which we felt was a requirement to cool down this fire breathing dragon machine. We also opted for two additional 8cm fans, and placed them blowing from front to back underneath the 3.5" drive bay housing.

After installing Windows98 Second Edition and the required test software, we were ready to ignite the burners on Sharky's Machine and see just what new heights we could reach. To set the mood, we played the soundtrack from "The Right Stuff" in the background…