An Upgrade Path Special Report - Hail Ming: The Next Generation!
A late update. By now everyone has had about the new computer geohard has...
I had been wanting to do this for a while; earlier in the year I replaced his Athlon XP 1600 with an Athlon XP 2100 and his Radeon 7500 with a Radeon 9600, and that was pushing the limits of his architecture. It was still a fairly capable machine, but he had made one decision that concerned me - he had installed a pair of ancient SCSI hard drives from an older computer that held some data he wanted to keep. They were small capacity (four gigs each) but had a very high rotational speed by 1997 standards and a fairly high power draw to match, and dear Lords of Kobol, the NOISE...
And then one fine spring evening geohard called and informed me that his machine had gone down and wouldn’t reboot. I checked it over, got it to partially reboot a couple of times, and quickly figured out what the problem was - the power supply had gone bad and overvolted and taken the mainboard down with it. There was no telling what else might have been damaged, so we pressed his media PC (largely unused since he got his laptop) into service as a backup machine. Both his main rig and the media PC used motherboards with VIA chipsets, so I plugged his hard drive and video card from the now dead computer into the backup and crossed my fingers.
It required a couple of reboots and driver reinstalls, but it worked. His hard drive was undamaged and the video card purred happily along. I dug through my parts bin at home and found enough PC133 SDRAM to bump the machine up to 512 megs of RAM so it could more easily handle general purpose computing and then asked, “What do you want to build now?”
geohard shook his head and sighed. “Right now - nothing. I’m going to Japan for WorldCon in a few months, so all my money is getting saved for that. As long as this machine is working I’ll stick with it until I get back from Japan, and then I’ll talk to you.”
Then, a couple of months ago, realsarah offered me a proposal - if I would build geohard a new PC for his birthday she would buy all the parts. I asked her to specify a budget for me to work within, she provided it, and I got busy with comparison shopping.
I didn’t set out to build geohard a more powerful PC than he had; more power was an inevitable consequence of the fact that I built his now-dead rig almost five years ago. I proceeded from the two most important considerations that one must use when budget shopping for computers and computer parts - One: find the price/performance “sweet spot” (the most power for the least money), and Two: the most future-ready components you can get at the price (how much room you have to grow). Beyond that, you essentially look for components that are well-regarded and reliable.
I priced out four different configurations; two AMD- and two Intel-based. In years past I wouldn’t have even given Intel a sideways glance, but times have changed and they no longer suck… and in the end, it was the Intel-based machine that I built. And I am proud to say that this is one of the finest computers I have ever made. geohard, I’m a little envious.
First off, the mainboard. After looking at a great many boards for both Intel and AMD processors, I chose the Gigabyte DS3L. This board is built around Intel’s new P35 chipset, runs Intel’s latest and greatest chips now and will also be fully compatible with their “Penryn” series 45 nm quad-core chips next year, overclocks easily, has built-in HiDef audio, uses solid capacitors throughout, and is very affordable. Folks, if you’re building a computer right now and want the best you can get for the least money, build your machine on this board. It’s a beautiful piece of solid engineering, and one of the finest mainboards I have ever worked with. I’m seriously considering going with Intel for my next rig and if I do, I’m using this board.
For the CPU, nothing less than dual-core was an option. Intel’s Core 2 lineup is quite impressive but, even after recent price cuts in their price war with AMD, still a bit outside the budget... I opted for the Pentium E2140 which, despite the ancient name, is built on the same architecture as the Core 2 Duos; the differences being a smaller L2 cache and an 800 MHz bus. The E2140's Allendale core looks slow on paper, but only in comparison to its bigger brothers (Allendale is simply a Conroe with part of the L2 cache disabled); in the real world it’s actually on par with the faster-clocked Athlon 64 X2 3800. Entry-level doesn't mean weak.
RAM was accounted for by a 2 gig dual-channel DDR2-800 kit from A-Data, a solid and reliable manufacturer whose products I've trusted for years.
A 500 gig SATA-II hard drive from Western Digital handles the storage duty in the new computer; it runs very quietly and with low temperatures.
For the graphics card there were a lot of choices, but only two good ones for this budget - the GeForce 7600GT or the Radeon X1950 Pro. These cards remain, despite the advent of newer mid-range DirectX 10 cards, clearly the best performers available in their price ranges by a huge margin. GeForce 7600 GT's can be found for under a hundred dollars and Radeon X1950 Pros for somewhat more, and the latter is what I chose. In fact I ordered the same Sapphire-built card I use - twelve rendering pipelines, thirty-six vertex shaders, and 256 megs of RAM on a 256-bit memory bus all running at nearly six hundred megahertz. Aw, yeah.
Since the stock cooler on the above Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro is a bit loud and doesn’t cool as well as I’d like, I picked up an impressive VGA cooler from Cooler Master which is whisper-quiet and does a better job of cooling the GPU than the Vantec that I put on mine last spring.
To power all this I got a nice 500-watt power supply from Rosewill that delivers 33 amps on the 12-volt rail.
I built everything into the full tower Antec case that had housed the previous computer because geohard had previously specified that as his intention. His DVD burner was now working in the backup machine so there was no need to purchase one of those. (The original mainboard, CPU, and RAM were a loss.) Everything else was put together while he was in Japan.
After assembly, installation of software, tweaking, and customization, I did what every True Geek ™ should do after a successful build - I took it to a LAN party. My friend Illiante held a smallish Supreme Commander fest at his place, and geohard’s new machine made a stunning debut there. In an era where most games emphasize GPU power, Supreme Commander is an extremely CPU-heavy game and so provided an excellent real-world test for the Pentium E2140 at the heart of geohard’s computer; it held up admirably against every other dual-core machine there (my Athlon 64 X2 4800, an Opteron 180, and a Core 2 Duo 4300) and far outpaced single-core rigs with faster clock speeds.
So, the goal was modern performance now with lots of room to grow in the future. This goal was met with flying colors. And now it's sitting back in geohard's office where its earlier incarnation was stationed, ready for anything that it might be required to do, and able to grow to over four times its current strength merely by replacing a single chip. As I said above, this is a machine that I am extremely proud to say that I built. I take pride in all my work, and over the years I've managed to produced consistently good results with sometimes very limited resources, but this one really stands out and was an absolute joy to build. Happy birthday, geohard.
I had been wanting to do this for a while; earlier in the year I replaced his Athlon XP 1600 with an Athlon XP 2100 and his Radeon 7500 with a Radeon 9600, and that was pushing the limits of his architecture. It was still a fairly capable machine, but he had made one decision that concerned me - he had installed a pair of ancient SCSI hard drives from an older computer that held some data he wanted to keep. They were small capacity (four gigs each) but had a very high rotational speed by 1997 standards and a fairly high power draw to match, and dear Lords of Kobol, the NOISE...
And then one fine spring evening geohard called and informed me that his machine had gone down and wouldn’t reboot. I checked it over, got it to partially reboot a couple of times, and quickly figured out what the problem was - the power supply had gone bad and overvolted and taken the mainboard down with it. There was no telling what else might have been damaged, so we pressed his media PC (largely unused since he got his laptop) into service as a backup machine. Both his main rig and the media PC used motherboards with VIA chipsets, so I plugged his hard drive and video card from the now dead computer into the backup and crossed my fingers.
It required a couple of reboots and driver reinstalls, but it worked. His hard drive was undamaged and the video card purred happily along. I dug through my parts bin at home and found enough PC133 SDRAM to bump the machine up to 512 megs of RAM so it could more easily handle general purpose computing and then asked, “What do you want to build now?”
geohard shook his head and sighed. “Right now - nothing. I’m going to Japan for WorldCon in a few months, so all my money is getting saved for that. As long as this machine is working I’ll stick with it until I get back from Japan, and then I’ll talk to you.”
Then, a couple of months ago, realsarah offered me a proposal - if I would build geohard a new PC for his birthday she would buy all the parts. I asked her to specify a budget for me to work within, she provided it, and I got busy with comparison shopping.
I didn’t set out to build geohard a more powerful PC than he had; more power was an inevitable consequence of the fact that I built his now-dead rig almost five years ago. I proceeded from the two most important considerations that one must use when budget shopping for computers and computer parts - One: find the price/performance “sweet spot” (the most power for the least money), and Two: the most future-ready components you can get at the price (how much room you have to grow). Beyond that, you essentially look for components that are well-regarded and reliable.
I priced out four different configurations; two AMD- and two Intel-based. In years past I wouldn’t have even given Intel a sideways glance, but times have changed and they no longer suck… and in the end, it was the Intel-based machine that I built. And I am proud to say that this is one of the finest computers I have ever made. geohard, I’m a little envious.
First off, the mainboard. After looking at a great many boards for both Intel and AMD processors, I chose the Gigabyte DS3L. This board is built around Intel’s new P35 chipset, runs Intel’s latest and greatest chips now and will also be fully compatible with their “Penryn” series 45 nm quad-core chips next year, overclocks easily, has built-in HiDef audio, uses solid capacitors throughout, and is very affordable. Folks, if you’re building a computer right now and want the best you can get for the least money, build your machine on this board. It’s a beautiful piece of solid engineering, and one of the finest mainboards I have ever worked with. I’m seriously considering going with Intel for my next rig and if I do, I’m using this board.
For the CPU, nothing less than dual-core was an option. Intel’s Core 2 lineup is quite impressive but, even after recent price cuts in their price war with AMD, still a bit outside the budget... I opted for the Pentium E2140 which, despite the ancient name, is built on the same architecture as the Core 2 Duos; the differences being a smaller L2 cache and an 800 MHz bus. The E2140's Allendale core looks slow on paper, but only in comparison to its bigger brothers (Allendale is simply a Conroe with part of the L2 cache disabled); in the real world it’s actually on par with the faster-clocked Athlon 64 X2 3800. Entry-level doesn't mean weak.
RAM was accounted for by a 2 gig dual-channel DDR2-800 kit from A-Data, a solid and reliable manufacturer whose products I've trusted for years.
A 500 gig SATA-II hard drive from Western Digital handles the storage duty in the new computer; it runs very quietly and with low temperatures.
For the graphics card there were a lot of choices, but only two good ones for this budget - the GeForce 7600GT or the Radeon X1950 Pro. These cards remain, despite the advent of newer mid-range DirectX 10 cards, clearly the best performers available in their price ranges by a huge margin. GeForce 7600 GT's can be found for under a hundred dollars and Radeon X1950 Pros for somewhat more, and the latter is what I chose. In fact I ordered the same Sapphire-built card I use - twelve rendering pipelines, thirty-six vertex shaders, and 256 megs of RAM on a 256-bit memory bus all running at nearly six hundred megahertz. Aw, yeah.
Since the stock cooler on the above Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro is a bit loud and doesn’t cool as well as I’d like, I picked up an impressive VGA cooler from Cooler Master which is whisper-quiet and does a better job of cooling the GPU than the Vantec that I put on mine last spring.
To power all this I got a nice 500-watt power supply from Rosewill that delivers 33 amps on the 12-volt rail.
I built everything into the full tower Antec case that had housed the previous computer because geohard had previously specified that as his intention. His DVD burner was now working in the backup machine so there was no need to purchase one of those. (The original mainboard, CPU, and RAM were a loss.) Everything else was put together while he was in Japan.
After assembly, installation of software, tweaking, and customization, I did what every True Geek ™ should do after a successful build - I took it to a LAN party. My friend Illiante held a smallish Supreme Commander fest at his place, and geohard’s new machine made a stunning debut there. In an era where most games emphasize GPU power, Supreme Commander is an extremely CPU-heavy game and so provided an excellent real-world test for the Pentium E2140 at the heart of geohard’s computer; it held up admirably against every other dual-core machine there (my Athlon 64 X2 4800, an Opteron 180, and a Core 2 Duo 4300) and far outpaced single-core rigs with faster clock speeds.
So, the goal was modern performance now with lots of room to grow in the future. This goal was met with flying colors. And now it's sitting back in geohard's office where its earlier incarnation was stationed, ready for anything that it might be required to do, and able to grow to over four times its current strength merely by replacing a single chip. As I said above, this is a machine that I am extremely proud to say that I built. I take pride in all my work, and over the years I've managed to produced consistently good results with sometimes very limited resources, but this one really stands out and was an absolute joy to build. Happy birthday, geohard.