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Power Gaming System Build Part I
By Len "Viking1" HjalmarsonArticle Type: Hardware
Article Date: November 01, 2001
A fast car is like a fast computer: it gets you to where you are going more quickly, and you can brag about it to your friends.
Some virtual pilots love to spend time tinkering. If you have mechanical ability and enjoy the study of how things work, why not build your own system? You can get superior quality and superior speed for less expense.
In the past five years I have built more than fifteen computer systems. As I researched components for another build, I realized that I had invested almost ten hours of research in order to find high quality parts, and to understand which parts I needed. This article will provide you with a parts list and a method to follow, as well as recommending some reliable vendors.
The Heart of the Matter
KG-7 Board
It used to be very expensive to build a state-of-the-art gaming PC. That isn’t the case anymore, and you could build the PC I built for about $1250 US.
The heart of a fast gaming PC is the motherboard. Ok, the chipset is really the heart, but supporting components have to be top quality. Not much point in putting a V12 engine in an Austin Mini. Furthermore, the BIOS, that place where the settings are finely tuned, is like the fuel injection system and electronic ignition combined. You need the best, and it has to be accessible and open to easy adjustment.
Over the past three years I have built systems exclusively with ABIT mainboards. ABIT with their SOFTMENU BIOS is arguably the most easily tuned motherboard, and I have never had to return one.
The Aston-Martin of current mainboards are the ABIT KG-7 and KG-7 RAID. Consider these motherboards to be a roaring V12, supporting a turbocharger in the form of PCI 2100 DDRAM memory and ATA 100 RAID. ATA 100 is the latest burst mode standard of IDE data transfer, and the RAID form (with dual hard disks operating in synch) is its fastest incarnation.
The KG-7 has other features that make it state-of-the-art. It sports four DIMM sockets rather than three, along with six PCI slots and an AGP slot. Gone is the old ISA slot, a throwback to DOS days. It also lacks the ISA/AMR/CNR headers that are rarely used in the retail board world. Also missing is integrated sound or video: a dedicated gamer wants high end parts and you can’t get them built into a mainboard—yet.
The KG-7 uses a hybrid chipset in order to move beyond the problems of VIA’s last KT266 chipset. It uses the AMD 761 Northbridge, a fast and efficient performer.
If I Only Had a Brain
The CPU is the brain of the machine. One might assume that a CPU is a CPU, however, this isn’t quite true. Certain steppings of brand name Intel or AMD CPU’s often have special characteristics. Notably, some of them can be run at higher speeds without complaining. How high? The 1333 MHz AMD Athlon we purchased is running comfortably at 1633 MHz.
AMD's Athlon
Granted, some 1333 Athlon CPUs will not run that fast, but the AYHJAR stepping is notorious for speed. Why not go with the newer ATHLON XP (the XP stands for eXtra Performance)?
With built in SSE instructions (Intel’s proprietary instructions for the Pentium III) it is roughly 10 percent faster where SSE is supported.
Why not go with the Athlon XP? Simply because overclocking the XP is more difficult, and it also sports a price premium. I would rather wait until they move to the 0.13 micron process later this year, and the prices drop. December will likely be a great time to move to the Athlon XP.
Any time you move a CPU beyond its rated speed you need to be prepared to deal with the extra heat generated. Since Athlon CPU’s already produce a generous amount of IR output, only the best CPU coolers should be chosen. Overclockerz Store and Coolerguys supply some of the best rated coolers in the business, and for this build we tried both the OCZ Gladiator as well as the ALPHA PAL 8045.
It’s surprising how much difference an effective cooler makes. I tested the Gladiator against an ATTech copper unit, and it ran 3 degrees Celsius cooler at 1650 MHz. I credit the thin fin design and quality workmanship, as well as the high speed Delta fan. The Gladiator is almost twice the weight of the ATTech unit. I also tried the ALPHA PAL 8045, and gained another 1 degree C in cooling (see system cooling for more details).
Thanks for the Memory!
Every brain needs a good memory, and the choice of memory modules is critical. The KG-7 BIOS allows extremely fine tuning of memory and bus speeds, and is a tweakers delight. (The bus is the data path between one component and another). While the normal bus speed of the 1333 Athlon is 266 MHz, the KG-7 allows me to run the bus at 300 MHz.
VIA's Chipset
Note, however, that the KG-7 does not sport the asynchronous bus of the earlier KT-7. The AMD 761 Northbridge is not like VIA’s chipset, and does not allow one to run the memory at one speed, while setting the FSB at another. The FSB chosen will be the number used by the multiplier to determine your memory speed and finally your CPU clock speed.
For this reason some of you may want to wait for Abit’s KR-7, or select Shuttle’s recent AK31 rv.3. Both of these mainboards are based on the latest VIA 266A chipset. The new VIA chipset adds Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Preprocessing (DASP) to the mix, and fine tunes memory access to improve bandwith by around 15 percent. The Shuttle board is available now, and happens to sell for as low as $89 on the Internet.
DDRAM Memory Module
Bargain basement DDRAM memory will not run at 300 MHz and CAS 2, so my choice was between Mushkin, OCZ and Corsair. I chose the latest PCI 2400 DDRAM from Absolute Multimedia. This memory, manufactured by Corsair, is rated to run at a CAS latency of 2-2-2 at 300 MHz. Compare this to the nearest competitor, Mushkin, whose memory is rated to run at 2-3-3. The benchmarks will show the difference.
Permanent On Site Storage
Choosing a hard disk is less problematic. Any reliable vendor who can provide ATA 100 capability at a spin rate of 7200 RPM is in the running. I happened to find an excellent price on the IBM Deskstar 40GXP and picked up two of them for $210. This gives my system 80GB capacity and extremely high transfer rates. I’m ready to begin research into the human genome!
A RAID disk system offers several options. I could choose redundant mode, where identical data is written simultaneously to each disk, or striping mode where half the data is written to one disk while half is written to the other. This mode increases throughput up to 30 percent, and this is the mode I chose.
If the motherboard is the heart and the CPU is the brain of the system, then the video board is visual cortex. In reality, modern 3D video accelerators do much of the work that the CPU used to do, and are almost a second brain. Your choice of video accelerator will impact your gaming as much as your choice of CPU.
Choosing a 3D Accelerator
OCZ's Titan 3 GF 3
For my high end system I really only have two choices: NVIDIA or ATI. Only the Radeon II and the GeForce3 are fully DirectX 8 compatible. Unfortunately, the drivers for the ATI board are still too immature for my liking. I wanted the best speed possible, and no compatibility issues as well as full features and chose OCZ’s Titan 3.
Are all GeForce3 boards created alike? Yes, with one exception. OCZ’s Titan 3 is the only GeForce3 board that sports 3.8ns DDR memory and a huge Blue Orb cooling unit. Furthermore, the copper heatsinks on the memory are double the size of the sinks on other GeForce3 boards.
The reason for this fancy hardware is to allow this video board to run at speeds that others only dream of. The default speed of the GeForce3 generation is 200MHz for the GPU, and 460 MHz for the memory. The Titan 3 is capable of 240MHz and 560MHz, enough to power my hot rod over even the toughest speed bumps.
