Motherboard:
Supermicro PIIIDR3
$588.00 (latest price
here)
For all the flack Intel took over the i820 fiasco, the
840 remains one
kickass chipset. Powering the server/workstation crowd, the 840 is a
flawless implementation of SMP, its only real limiting factor being its
affinity for RDRAM. As much as RDRAM breaks the bank, this project is
all about breaking the bank for the best possible components, so
without having to worry about our motherboard supporting only the most
expensive possible RAM, we can choose Supermicro's exotic 840 offering.
Now Supermicro may not be a brand everyone's heard of... but they have
an excellent reputation for building rock solid motherboard, especially
for the workstation/server environment. Since we're basically building
a gaming workstation, their workstation PIIIDR3 board fits the bill
nicely.
So why the PIIIDR3 over other boards? Well for one you
can get it, 840 workstation boards aren't that easy to find with most boards and
chipsets going to system builders like Dell and Gateway. What about
features? Well the PIIIDM3 has everything we'll need and a few nice
perks as well. Sure the ability to support our processors, and RDRAM
are kind of standard considerations (though the Supermicro web site
only lists support up to 933 MHz), this beauty also has the expected
USB and serial ports, even and ATA66 controller. What we also get that
is of interest would be an onboard single channel SCSI Ultra3/160
controller and an Intel Ethernet chip. Definitely nice additions to
the board though really things that are standard on most motherboards
in this segment. Couple that with the standard PCI/AGP slots and a
couple of PCI-64 slots and we have something that should meet our needs
easily.
Memory:
Kingston PC800 RDRAM 256MB (x4)
$697.00 per stick (latest price
here)
As expensive as it may be, RDRAM matters as MHz ramps
up, it's the
cream of the crop and for this project we can afford its price. Sure
we could have gone for 2 gigs, but that would have been excessive, even
for this. A gig of ram should keep us from thrashing the hard drive
doing pretty much anything, and should be able to handily take care of
any bloated software we might ever consider running. Kingston is one
of the biggest names in memory out there, they supply the big names
like Dell and Compaq... they should be good enough for us.
Operating
System: Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Price: $129.00 (latest price
here)
As much as WinME might be better suited for gaming,
we're running an
SMP rig and going through all the trouble of getting two processors
screaming at 1 GHz isn't worth it if the operating system only sees one
of them. In reality for the horsepower we're running here we really
need Windows 2000 to take full advantage of things. Since this machine
will be capable of doing a ridiculous number of things at once Win2k's
robust multi-tasking will be perfect... and with time its drivers
should catch up with the WinME crowd. You could also throw ME on here
if you wanted to, or BeOS, or Linux (though those two would pretty much
be a waste for gaming), but 2000 is really the clear winner for a
hardcore rig like this one. Not that ME isn't a great product, it
would just be wasted on this system.
Next page: Storage
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