Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C., September 3nd 2003
- Every year Maximum PC sets out to build the best PC that money can buy,
choosing the only the best quality parts to build it, regardless of cost.
This year, they chose the ABIT IC7-G motherboard as the foundation of
that system. Read on about the DREAM MACHINE 2003:
"After
seven years of building our annual Dream Machines, we can testify that
the process never gets any easier. Hardware breaks. Tempers flare. Someone
unsheathes a Leatherman multi-tool in anger, and the next thing you know,
we're dividing the Lab in two because one editor couldn't convince another
editor that soda pop makes a damn fine liquid-cooling agent.
And, of course, every year we scramble for extra development time in order
to add that single component that will push our Dream Machine over the
edge. Just one more week. Just one more frickin' week, and that coveted,
top-secret part will arrive.
True
to form, Dream Machine 2003 gave us one big Rolaid of a good time. We
didn't impose any price restrictions on this year's machine, so we reached
for the absolute best components available in every parts category. Some
parts choices were no-brainers. Other choices were the result of day-long
debates. And some component choices-such as our videocard decision-were
so damned close, we might as well have flipped a coin.
And after much soul searching, we're still wondering if we made all the
right decisions.
Last year, readers demanded exotic cooling.This year, we oblige with a
unique cooling system that not only chills our components for ambitious
but stable overclocking, but also fits inside our oh-soportable case-something
you just can't do with any of the phasechange systems available today.
We give you Dream Machine 2003, the ultimate desktop PC for home enthusiasts.
It was well worth the internecine fighting.
Motherboard: ABIT IC7-G
After
nailing down the Pentium 4 as our dream processor, our chipset choice--Intel's
875P, aka "Canterwood"--was a no-brainer. With dual-channel
DDR400 memory support, Communication Streaming Architecture for improved
networking bandwidth, and native Serial ATA support, the 875P is the chipset
standard for P4 machines. In fact, the 875P is so advanced, it'll probably
still be Intel's preferred core-logic when the Pentium 5 arrives. (That's
just an educated guess, of course. We don't even know if the new CPU will
be named Pentium 51)
While our chipset choice was easy, the question of which mobo to use demanded
much more attention. We were impressed by the build and configuration
of Chaintech's 9JCS Zenith, and by the performance of the Asus P4C800
Deluxe. But in the end, we picked just the right tool for the job. Because
overclocking is the dominant theme of this year's project, we went with
the board that provides the best chance for stratospheric frequencies:
ABIT's IC7-G.
To many overclocking fanatics, ABIT invented overclocking by being the
first mobo company to offer frontside bus controls via a software interface.
Our particular ABIT board has full settings for controlling CPU, memory,
and AGP voltage, as well as a comprehensive array of PCI/AGP dividers.
The dividers are helpful for overclocking antics. If bus overclocking
were to throw our PCI bus out of spec, our RAID striping might fall apart.
But with our PCI bus properly locked down by the BIOS divider, we can
keep everything running smoothly. Which leads us to the IC7-G's RAID support.
With four Serial ATA ports and complete RAID capabilities offered onboard,
the motherboard allowed us to run two RAID 0 arrays without any assistance
from a PCI controller card. More about this later.www.abit.com.tw
Hard Drives: WD Raptors and Caviar SEs
When
Western Digital released the first non-SCSI 10,000rpm drive a few months
ago, we knew that we would eventually install at least one of these Serial
ATA monsters in Dream Machine 2003. With 8MB of cache and benchmark scores
obliterating the fastest 7200rpm competitors, the 360 Raptors are blnkingly
fast. The problem is that they hold just 36GB a piece, so even when we
ddoubled their capacity via a RAID 0 array, we had just 72GB of storage
space. That's not Dream MAchine caliber, now is it?
The
solution, of course, was to throw two RAID 0 arrays on our ABIT motherboard--the
aforementioned Raptor drives complemented by tow 250 GB Western Digital
Caviar SE drives )7200rpm, 8 MB cashe). The high-end Raptor drives un
on the SATA RAID controller intefreated into the Intel 875P chipset, while
teh Caviars hook into the Silicon IMage RAID controller soldered onto
our motherboard's PCB. All told, we stuffed some 572GB of data into this
year's rig, and pretty much assured ourselves of never having to uninstall
apps to make space ever again."
To check out the full article buy the September
issue of Maximum PC on news stands now!
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