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AMD and nVidia Produce a Winner (Read 425 times)
Jun 22nd, 2003 at 9:12pm

congo   Offline
Colonel
Make BIOS your Friend
Australia

Gender: male
Posts: 3663
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Anyone considering a computer upgrade might be interested in this.

My new system has been running smoothly for two months now and I feel it’s safe to report that it is indeed a fine system built at a budget price.

This configuration seems to work exceptionally well. The system is synchronised at 333mhz FSB speed. (or there abouts   Grin)

MAINBOARD:
Soltek SL-75FRN2-L
Nvidia nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset using 333mhz front side bus speed and ram in dual channel mode.

CPU:
AMD Athlon XP2600+ Touroughbred B with 256k L2 Cache RAM and 333mhz front side bus support.

RAM:
1024mb (2 x 512mb) PC2700 DDR Kingston ‘Value RAM’ running in dual channel mode at 333mhz front side bus speed.

VIDEO CARD:
Mercury GeForce 4 TI4200 128mb DDR with 8x AGP (driver = nv43.51)

HARD DISK:
80gb Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm ATA100 with 8mb cache.

SOUND:
Onboard 6 channel AC97 Codec.

POWER SUPPLY:
Codegn 350W and Midi tower (some Midi towers are not long enough for the Soltek mainboard and a bay could get blocked due to its length)

TECHNICAL BENCHMARKS:

SiSoft Sandra-
CPU Arithmetic =  8238 mips, 3330 MFLOP
Memory Bandwidth = INT 2562mb/second, FLOAT 2450mb/second

3D Mark 2001 = 12250
1024 x 768 x 32 blended settings with anitaliasing off and nv43.51 driver.

The figures are high and there is a good reason.

The BIOS supports easy overclocking. I adjusted the CPU multiplier from 12.5x (xp2600 default) to 13x  

I set the BIOS performance settings to “Turbo” and manually adjusted the Front Side Bus speed from 166mhz to 170mhz.

These actions produced a tiny little overclock which resulted in my CPU benchmarking faster than a XP3000+ CPU at stock speed.

The upshot of all this is a very stable, very fast computer that was cheap to build.
 

...Mainboard: Asus P5K-Premium, CPU=Intel E6850 @ x8x450fsb 3.6ghz, RAM: 4gb PC8500 Team Dark, Video: NV8800GT, HDD: 2x1Tb Samsung F3 RAID-0 + 1Tb F3, PSU: Antec 550 Basiq, OS: Win7x64, Display: 24" WS LCD
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Reply #1 - Jun 23rd, 2003 at 10:02am
ATI_9700pro   Ex Member

 
a nice system,but i'd rather change the graphics card to an ATI 9700(not pro),if you're also playing other games ,not only FS.
 
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Reply #2 - Jun 23rd, 2003 at 12:33pm

congo   Offline
Colonel
Make BIOS your Friend
Australia

Gender: male
Posts: 3663
*****
 
Of course you would!

And so would I..   Grin


But, this was, I repeat, a budget system build.

The radeon card cost twice as much here at the bottom line stores.

From the benchmark here: http://www17.tomshardware.com/graphic/20021218/vgacharts-05.html

you can see that the radeon scored just over 14000 points and the TI4200 gets about 12250 points.

The budget minded would be happy to take a small FPS hit for a half price card!   Wink

Oh, and here is that mobo:

...
 

...Mainboard: Asus P5K-Premium, CPU=Intel E6850 @ x8x450fsb 3.6ghz, RAM: 4gb PC8500 Team Dark, Video: NV8800GT, HDD: 2x1Tb Samsung F3 RAID-0 + 1Tb F3, PSU: Antec 550 Basiq, OS: Win7x64, Display: 24" WS LCD
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Reply #3 - Jun 24th, 2003 at 1:12pm
ATI_9700pro   Ex Member

 
i wouldn't need it,i'm quite happy with my EP-8KHA+ (KT266A). but a better CPU would be great (2800+ preferred). Sad
 
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