| The Turbo Gaming System
by Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson |
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Two months back we built a dual celeron system around the Shuttle 649A, and then a budget system based on the Abit BX6. This third article will recommend components for the less budget conscious crowd. The total system price will end up somewhere around $1500 US. This article is NOT based on an actual system build but is our current recommendation for a system build. Parts List
One of the recent changes in technology involves the new ATA 66 standard. Ultra DMA drives up til now have been limited to a burst rate of 33 MB/second. But with the new standard now appearing on mainboards as well as stand alone UDMA adapters, burst rate capability has doubled with the latest hard drives. Around February 1st, 1999 ABIT Taiwan released revision 2.0 of their excellent mainboard. Improvements included features soft and hard, like a fifth PCI slot and a six chip data buffer set and SOFTMENU II. This is an excellent board for overclockers, and can be updated easily to ATA 66 using the Promise Ultra 66 board. The Microstar is an equally good choice, however, and can be found a bit cheaper than the Abit board.
 3DfxCOOL PHO Fan Keep Your Cool Any time you push a CPU beyond its rated speed, you need a big fan. 3DfxCOOL. 3DfxCOOL stocks a huge range of fans and will even custom build fans. I chose two fans as listed above. The PHO (Pentium high output) you see above is a massive unit that Bart chose after testing twenty five different units. This one ran 14 degrees (fahrenheit) cooler than the next best unit! The PHO is the biggest fan/heatsink for socket 7 CPUs that is available today, and is a large 60mm item with a dual ball bearing motor. The aluminum heatsink has a Thermal Resistance of 0.5° c/w. With the smart fan features your BIOS will be able to monitor the fan's RPM and set off an alarm if it drops too low. |
 With the correct software (Motherboard Monitor ), you will be able to monitor fan speed and CPU temperature in your operating system.
Now let's consider the rest of the components. I chose the Quantum Fireball Plus KA for the best performance possible under UDMA. This new breed of drive is around 40% faster than the older 5400 RPM hardware and supports the new ATA 66 burst standard, and arrives complete with the necessary cable. Since I would be clocking the Celeron to 500 or the Pentium III to 550 it's important to supply data quickly to eliminate any bottlenecks.
 I chose the Kenwood Multibeam CD ROM as the best price/performance hardware short of going with a DVD/CD combination. This device screams along and is quiet to boot. The TB Montego II Quadzilla has a rock steady game port, four speaker support, and uses the Vortex II chipset for A3d in hardware. With complete D3d acceleration in hardware and digital output, this board is a no brainer for about $99. (Watch for a full review on this, the FPS 2000, and the Microstar 6163 soon.) With sound output of this quality, the Soundworks FPS2000 is a good choice. With this system you have complete digital output and four speaker surround for around $139 US. In my last article I chose the Voodoo3 for video. Today my preference has swung to a TNT2 Ultra or Matrox G400 based board, although I recommend waiting for the release of the G400 MAX. I chose both the Wingman Force as well as a CH or TM HOTAS. The ultimate in programmability is gained by the Thrustmaster gear, but some will prefer CH Products. For the best performance possible USB is the way to go, so if you aren't in a hurry wait for the release of CH new USB throttle. Both SUNCOM and Saitek will also release complete USB systems this fall. Join a discussion forum on this article by clicking HERE.
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