The day has finally come. I have been forced to make a decision on the ever present question in any PC gamers mind: wait for next week, when prices will be lower and chips faster, or buy now and don't worry about the pain it will cause your credit card. I generally find myself to be an early adopter of new PC technology, especially when enough new technology is on the market.
With the release of the new Intel 'Conroe' chips and ATI releasing the new 3200 series motherboard chips, I figured now was the best time to go for a new system. Intel's new chips have driven down AMD's prices and ATI's motherboard chips are finally challenging nVidia's nForce chips. The reason behind waiting for the ATI chips was because didn't really want to help support nVidia's weak attempt to make more money by pushing SLI on the market.
To me, SLI is like a car manufactor putting two engines in a sports car to make it faster, instead of just making a faster engine. With ATI however, their Crossfire system does things a little different. They do harness the two graphics cards to perform graphics rendering, but they also allow for the splitting of graphics and physics duties of the cards. This allows the computer to pass physics processing to one card and graphics processing to the other. This is a major step in the right direction. Instead of being forced to buy a physics only PCI card, you are able to have two graphics cards that render physics part time when needed.
I initially ordered an ECS KA3-MVP motherboard. This is the first AM2 / 3200 motherboard to hit the market. I know ECS is generally known as a budget board maker, but I couldn't wait any longer for the MSI K9A Platinum to come out. Once it reaches the market, I will be moving the system to it.
Old System:- Hydralic Case (2001)
- MSI KT4 Ultra-FISR (2001)
- Athlon XP 2200+ (2001)
- ATI 9600xt (2005)
- Corsair 1GB XMS DDR400 CAS 2 (2001)
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- Lian Li V COOL PC-V1200B
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
- ECS KA3 MVP
- ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire Edition
- ATI Radeon X1900XT
- CORSAIR XMS2 2GB
- OCZ GameXStream 700W
- Creative SOUND BLASTER X-Fi Fatal1ty
- Scythe Ninja
- Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 500
- Seagate Barracuda SATAII 7200.10
From the list you can see that I am an ATI, AMD, and MSI fanboy. I stayed away from the Lian-Li v1200 Plus and Plus II. Since I will be adding a window to the side of the case, the side mounted fans would have only gotten in the way. I also stayed away from the high end AM2 chips because of all the reviews online saying that you can push a 3800+ to 5000+ speeds with overclocking and good cooling.
I loved my Hercules Game Theater XP sound card that came with the break-out box. At the time it was one of the most advanced sound cards on the market. It allowed for the processing of sound to be handled completely by the sound card, allowing the cpu to do more important things. I considered waiting for the Razer AC-1 Gaming Audio Card that is set to be released in October 2006. Since it is lacking a break-out box, I decided to go ahead with the Creative card.
The Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 500 will be the third tv tuner card that I have purchased over the years. Due to my lack of knowledge about tuner cards, the previous two cards used software encoding. This is a huge drain on the system and basicly leaves the computer useless during recording times. The WinTV-PVR 500 is a hardware encoding card. This means it actually handles all encoding director on the card, instead of using system resources. It is also a dual tuner allowing for the recording of two shows at once. It is missing the remote, but since the Creative SOUND BLASTER X-Fi Fatal1ty comes with a remote and receiver, I wasn't worried about not getting the Hauppauge remote.
Once the Razer Tarantula is released next month, I will be adding this to the system also.
Coming soon, I will be adding articles on painting the interior of the Lian-Li V1200 and benchmarks on the system.
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