In my opinion the best 2003 PC would be based on Athlon 64 as it was the best processor back then and would be something along the lines:
1. Athlon 64 3200 clawhammer.
2. Abit KV8-MAX3 with VIA KT800 chipset and full 800MHZ hypertransport interface and NOT nforce3 150 with only 600MHZ hypertransport.
3. 2gb of low latency DDR-400.
4. Ati radeon 9800XT which you already have.
5. WD raptor - the best hard drive of 2003.

well, there was in fact something even better than what you just mentioned, and is what I'm looking for right now, seems to be really, really rare tho, and I'm not sure if it's a good idea to mention it right now, as I'll probably just increase my competition when one shows up 😉 Just as a hint - socket 940 😉

I'm also planning what is turning out to be a 2003 era build (don't worry, not socket 940) so I'm looking forward to seeing this build develop.

Good luck with it.

That's one of my favorite eras of computers and games. I'm very much looking forward to seeing you build this system.

I already have what I describe as the pinnacle of socket 754 and plan to do someday a big comparison to see which platform is better:
Athlon 64 3400 Venice core
Corsair 2*1gb CAS2 with silver heat spreaders
WD raptor 74gb
Abit KV8 PRO chipset VIA KT800 PRO; NF8 PRO chipset NVIDIA NFORCE3 250gb; NV8 chipset NFORCE4 4x
Geforce 6800 ultra PCI-express. The only thing missing is the AGP version of the video card which is very rare and expensive. If not possible I will use the geforce 7600gt which has near identical performance because I have both the AGP and the PCI-express versions.
The system with the KV8 PRO is fully assembled and is one of my favorites: it plays even the most demanding games up to 2004 with over 60 FPS and is compatible with every old one including Panzer General 2; Diablo hellfire and so on. I can set the CPU multiplier in BIOS to 4X and get a 800 MHz processor which is perfect for some of the oldies. Windows XP flies on such a machine; the only problem is the internet which is very heavy for a single core today.

Really nice system, tho I would count your system towards 2004, as the 3400+ and 74gb raptor and the 6800 ultra are 2004 parts... actually even the abit kv8 pro seems to be released in 2004. Talking of this, doesnt seem like I will be able to post a 2004 build thread anytime soon, as the only 2004 parts I currently have are an abit aa8-duramax (intel 925x s.775) board and a dfi lanparty nf3-250gb (s.754), neither of which I would consider quite ultimate for 2004, it has to be a nf3 ultra s.939 board of some sort, and I might obtain one from Epox soon. Search for a 6800 Ultra is pretty gruelling too, and ati X800XT PE is not that much easier to find either...

I considered period correct machines but ultimately I decided that what Phil names as "time machine"is much more feasible and more fun for me. For example finding period correct hard drives in good working order is really really difficult; I was lucky with that Raptor but otherwise the hard drives are newer than the rest of the components. I choose to build end of era machines that reflect the best possible components available on a specific platform and because I am an Abit fan I built all of my machines around an Abit motherboard: for socket 462 that would be Athlon XP 3200 with Abit AN7 or KW7 ; for socket 370 that would be Pentium 3 1400s with ST6 or VH6T and so on. What I hope to do eventually is to make a comparison between the different platforms on the same socket - VIA, NVIDIA, Intel - and between end of an era machines: Pentium 3 1400s vs Athlon 1400c; Athlon 64 X2 4800/FX-60 vs Pentium D 960/965.

I know RGB lighting is all the craze but personally I like copper heatsinks and load based ram lighting.
its bling but with a purpose, in theory at least.

Had a job where I could get hardware at cost so built 2 PC's based off that very motherboard, One for my brother and the other for a mate.
Graphics would have been GeForce FX of some kind depending on budget. Can't remember which CPU's but 2400 seems to ring a bell for at least one of them.
Brothers didn't seem to be as reliable as my aging Gateway Slot 1 PC but that may be down to drivers not been as mature.
Not sure about my mates, I only ever visited when he was having parties where booze and girls (somewhat stupidly in that order) more then his PC.

some ebay stuff got delivered today, among them a WD Raptor 36gb, first model of the series and fastest hdd of 2003, I'll use it as the boot drive in the 2003 build. I'll probably dualboot win98se + win2000, might also try to add winXP SP1 for the heck of it, as it was available back then, but I don't expect it to be as good as win2k, XP really got good after SP2

You really are serous about period correct.

I sure am. Also..... awwww fuck! that 36gb Raptor seems to be dead. I tried to mount it to install win98se, win2000 sp3, winXP SP1, and maybe Longhorn Build 4015 on it, and... bios doesn't detect it, and honestly I don't even feel it to be spinning at all 🙁

First generation Raptor should be avoided.

Why? They have a design fault or something? Still, that doesn't explain why seller had it marked as "used" instead of "not working"

From what I saw, they aren't very reliable. They also use IDE interface internally, with Marvell SATA bridge, which may lead to problems too.

very nice, I have very found memories of the era with this sort of setup, AXP+nforce2+radeon 9500/9700/9800 was the way to go for performance vs price for some high end gaming,
but, 2GB makes no sense in this context, also I don't think any game that runs well on this PC will benefit from more than 1GB.

Heres one more WD Caviar SE 250gb, this one is a bit weird because it doesnt say "SE" on the label, but I tested it just now and hard disk sentinel detects it as Caviar SE and detects the correct 8mb cache. This makes two WD2500JBs, I need 2 more to fill all the 3.5" slots, and an extra ide controller for the other 2 😀

As for the 36gb Raptor, seller admitted he didn't test it before sending it, looks like he will agree to refund me. After that... guess I need to buy another, but this was the cheapest one on ebay, all the other 36gb raptors are quite ovepriced 🙁 And yes, even after now learning these have reliability issues, I still want to experience a (working) one in this machine, for as long as it works, and when it dies I can then replace it for like a scsi hdd or a regular 7200rpm hdd, but first I really want to experience what a working 36gb raptor feels like 🙁

As someone who's had 5 36gig raptors in raid 5 back in the day you really need to get one. Sure they can have issues but they were fast drives.

And now here's the Athlon XP 3000+, fastest cpu of the early months of 2003, was surprisingly hard to find, but got it quite cheap 😀 at 2167mhz, its not really much slower than the 2200mhz 3200+ that came out 3 months later, which, at that point P4 HT 3.2 had already came out and was faster than both, so 3200+ is less of a top dog than 3000+ was, 3000+ was genuinely beating the P4 HT 3.06. Also 3000+ has higher multiplier than 3200+, which should mean more overclocking potential, we'll see 😉

God Of Gaming wrote on 2020-07-29, 07:31:

Also 3000+ has higher multiplier than 3200+, which should mean more overclocking potential, we'll see 😉

I think a higher multi is relevant only if your multi is fixed, and you have:

• no mainboard overclocking options
• not closed L1 bridges and a cpu built after CW43 of year '03

Otherwise, if you have an early built cpu and a good OC mainboard, then it does not matter if your multi is higher or lower.
At the end the stepping and cpu lottery rules...