First post, by Great Hierophant
- Rank
- l33t
The new rig I ordered today, and will pay for tommorow, will have the following system specs:
Athlon FX-55 (90nm San Diego core) CPU @ 2.6GHz/1MB L2
2x 512MB OCZ Platinum EL Rev. 2 Dual Channel PC3200 DDR RAM
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI nForce 4 Motherboard
2x nVidia GeForce 7800GXT GPUs
2x Hitachi T7K250 160GB SATA II Hard Drives
Plextor PX-716SA 16x DVD+/-R DL Rewritable Drive
Entermax EG565AX-VEFMA2.0-SLI 535W PSU
Lian Li V1200 PC Case
NEC LCD1980FXI 19" LCD
Teac 1.44MB Floppy
Logitech MX1000 Cordless Mouse
Win XP Pro w/SP2
I am keeping my Klipsch 4.1 speakers (still very competitive), cable modem (no need to upgrade it) and Keytronic (can't afford an Avant clicky-style keyboard yet) from my old computer. In all, I have spent $4,000 on the new PC. It will certainly be a welcome replacement for the current rig I use now:
Pentium III 800MHz (overclocked from 600MHz)
128MB PC133 SDRAM
Asus CUBX BX Motherboard
Geforce Ti4200 w/ 128MB AGP
Western Digital 18GB 7200 RPM Hard Disk
Pioneer 16X DVD-ROM drive
HP CD-Writer 8200+ 48x16x48
Sound Blaster Live!
InWin Steel Full Tower Case
RealMagic Hollywood Plus DVD Decoder
Packard Bell 15" VGA Monitor (max res 800x600@64K, my 19" failed on me)
Teac 1.44MB Floppy
(I'm not 100% about some of these specs anymore.)
As you can see, my main theme for the new system is the least amount of fuss possible and the maximum performance possible within reason. All the drives except the floppy drive of the new system use SATA ports, even the Plextor. Almost all the peripherals I will be connecting to the system will use USB connections (printer, mouse, midi.) It won't even have a separate sound card as there is a Sound Blaster Live! 7.1 on the MSI board, which is good enough for games.
As for performance, 2 Geforce 7800GTXs in an SLI configuration should give me the best performance possible. The SATA II and NCQ of the Hitachis have shown some impressive results. I intend to overclock the FX-55 to the yet to be released FX-57 levels, hopefully making the round 3.0GHz. I especially selected the RAM to help me accomplish this, but otherwise it should run with the lowest latencies possible.
The case was an especially hard decision to make, but the Lian Li case is well-ventilated, promises cool temperatures and should be a dream to work with after the current steel monstrosity I currently work with. I had seriously considered a PC Power and Cooling PSU, but the Entermax unit has a good rep and was $100 cheaper. As for the NEC LCD, its ability to pivot 90 degrees on its axis, so called "portrait mode", makes it ideal for MAME. Plus it has image quality approaching professional LCDs and good pixel response times.