First post, by Artex
- Rank
- l33t
It's been awhile friends but..
I present to you my latest build... "Hammer Time!" (aka - the Intel Eater)
For this build, I finally managed to find a boxed (and in great shape!) Asus SK8V motherboard. As luck would have it, this the board came with an FX-53 processor, Stock CPU Cooler, I/O Shield and pretty much all the motherboard goodies still sealed in their respective baggies - all for $35! Hard to pass up, and I've wanted to pit this build against my previous speed demon - the Intel P4 3.2Ghz EE - from a while back.
I think you'll see that this build is ballz-fast - even edging out the P4 "Emergency Edition" in most cases, probably due to the 1MB of blisteringly fast L2 cache & integrated memory controller. I originally threw in my Sapphire HD3850 AGP card in an effort to max this build out, but I found that I actually got better scores using the 7900GT-core of the Gainward Bliss 7800GS+ (that I also used in my previous P4EE build). So it's almost as if that HD3850 card was simply too 'new' for the Socket 940 setup and the drivers simply weren't optimized for this type of setup. Once I threw in the Bliss, the scores looked much better and closer to what I would expect given the results while testing on the Intel platform.
On with the show!!
The goods...
Black NZXT Source 210
OCZ 700W Power Supply
Asus SK8V Socket 940 Motherboard w/VIA Apollo K8T800 Chipset, using 1003.008 BIOS
AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 2.4Ghz "SledgeHammer"
Stock CPU Cooling
Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATARaid Controller
Western Digital Velociraptor 150GB SATA Hard Drive (WDC WD15 00HLFS-01G6U0)
Western Digital 750GB SATA Hard Drive (WDC WD75 00AAKS-00RBA0)
SATA DVD-RW
Gainward Bliss 7800GS+ Golden Sample Special Edition 512MB AGP (G71 Core) (24 pixel pipelines/8 vertex shaders vs 20/7 of late models)
2 x 1GB Corsair PC3200 Registered ECC Dual DDR Memory (CM72SD1024RLP-3200)
Windows XP SP3
Motherboard and CPU
Using the most popular socket 940 board of the time for the AMD FX-53 - the mighty K8T800 Apollo-based Asus SK8V.
Storage
The Velociraptor for speed, the 750GB for storage. 😀
How did I install Windows? USB boot support of course! 😀
Memory
Given the registered RAM requirement of the Socket 940 platform, I opted for two sticks of Corsair Registered & ECC memory
Sound Card
For now, I'm using the onboard audio but I did pick up a few Aureal SQ2500's so I may throw one in.
Video Card
Ahh.. the video card. This one holds a special spot in my collection. I could've really maxed out this build by throwing in an HD3850 (released later) but then I wouldn't get to fire up my beloved Gainward Bliss 7800GS+ freak of nature. Not sure how many of you know about this card, but it was released in 2006 and was not readily available in the US. Back in the day, I was looking to extend the life of my aging AGP system which was using a BFG 6800GT + Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 5 + Gainward 6800 Ultra flashed BIOS. I heard some rumblings about this card in EU, and I found a single store that was selling it - Overclockers UK. I purchased it July 12th 2006, and paid 234 British Pounds (NOT Including Shipping to the US)!
Now, there's more to this card than meets the eye. One would think it's based on the NVIDIA 7800 (G70) core given it's name. This card, however, is actually running the 7900GT core (G71) but over the AGP bus instead of PCIe. So this card has the full 24 pixel pipelines and 8 vertex shaders enabled. Adding to the confusion, Gainward released at least three variants of the 7800GS. Supposedly there are only 1500 of these "GS+" editions out there - no idea if that's true or not.
Gainward 7685-BLISS 7800GS 256MB TV-DVI AGP
Gainward GeForce BLISS 7800GS
Chip: 7800GT
Memory capacity: 256MB 1,6ns DDR
Clockspeed Core: 375MHZ
Clockspeed Mem: 1200MHZ
Pipes: 20
Gainwards barcode: 471846200-7685
Gainward 7739-BLISS 7800GS Silent 512MB
Gainward GeForce BLISS 7800GS AGP 512MB
Chip: 7800GT
Memory capacity: 512MB 1,4ns GDDR3
Clockspeed Core: 425MHZ
Clockspeed Mem: 1200MHZ
Pipes: 20
Gainwards barcode: 47846200-7739
Gainward 7876-BLISS 7800GS Silent 512MB GS+ 😎 😎 😎
Gainward GeForce BLISS 7800GS GoldenSample AGP 512MB
Chip: 7900GT
Core: 450MHZ
Mem: 1250MHZ
Pipes: 24
Gainwards barcode: 471846200-7876
How about some hardware pr0n?!?! 😊
Screen shots:
Benchmarks (all done using defaults & Forceware 93.71 WHQL Drivers)
My Retro B:\ytes YouTube Channel & Retro Collection