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
)
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.