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Fragland Year-End Extreme Gaming System
The last couple of weeks I've been thinking about an extreme gaming system that not only boasts loads of power but also has enough upgrading potential that it should be able to keep you going for quite a while without having to replace 90% of everything that's inside.
That's why today we bring you Fragland's 2004 Extreme Gaming System, a PC with lots of power, upgradeability, and no budget limits :)
Case:
- Antec Performance One P160 Midi Tower Alu No PSU
Price: €115
Power Supply:
- Antec Truepower 550W ATX P4
Price: €133
CPU:
- AMD AMD64 FX55 1MB S939 Sledgehammer Boxed (incl. Cooler)
Price: €840
Mobo:
- ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe NForce4 SLI S939 SLI Dual PCIEX Snd7.1 2GLAN SATA RAID 1394
Price: €169
Memory:
- Kingston Valueram 2048MB Kit (2*1024MB) PC3200 DDR LFT Warranty
Price: €522
Vidcard:
- ASUS EAX800XT HDTV Radeon X800XT 256DDR PCIE16 TV-out DVI HDTV VIVO
Price: €751
Soundcard:
- Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro
Price: €251
Harddisk:
- WD Raptor WD740GD 8MB 73,4GB SATA150 10000RPM
Price: €198
Harddisk 2:
- Maxtor Maxline Plus III 300GB 7200RPM 16MB SATA150 (7B300S0)
Price: €236
Optical Drive:
- Plextor PX-116A DVD 16X/48X IDE Black OEM
Price: €37
DVD Writer:
- ASUS DRW-1604P Dual Layer DVD+/-R/RW 16X/4X/16X IDE Black Retail
Price: €97
Total price: €3.349,00
When I see the price I know I'll never spend that much on a computer. On the other hand, there are people that do and when you really want the best of the best, this is the price class you have to take into consideration. Remember also that if you want to have it all at once, you can add a second PCI Express card, a second Raptor and a Second Maxtor 300GB Maxline III disk. That would mean of course adding another 1.185,00 euro's to the already big budget.
Anyway, there are people that buy hi-end pc's from VoodooPC and Alienware which also come at this price so I'm sure there are enough people out there that have the money to buy this system :)
All prices are taken from CrazyCamel.com, a Belgian online retailer
That's why today we bring you Fragland's 2004 Extreme Gaming System, a PC with lots of power, upgradeability, and no budget limits :)
Case:
- Antec Performance One P160 Midi Tower Alu No PSU
Price: €115
The P160 from Antec remains the best case I've seen in years. I stay with this choice because of obvious quality reasons and unless someone shows me a better case in this price category for less money, it will stay :)
[imglnk]31995[/imglnk]
Power Supply:
- Antec Truepower 550W ATX P4
Price: €133
Antec delivers good power supplies and we'll be needing the biggest model they've got for what we want to do. If you want it even better, I suggest you go to PCPowerandCooling who've got the best PSU's in the world but are only available through their site. Don't be surprised about the price though :)
[imglnk]31996[/imglnk]
CPU:
- AMD AMD64 FX55 1MB S939 Sledgehammer Boxed (incl. Cooler)
Price: €840
If you don't have to worry about budget, the FX55 is the cpu you want to have. It's the fastest on almost all applications and games and Intel only barely manages to beat it in video editing with the P4 Extreme Edition. For all other purposes (including games), nothing is faster than this beast.
Mobo:
- ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe NForce4 SLI S939 SLI Dual PCIEX Snd7.1 2GLAN SATA RAID 1394
Price: €169
We go for performance and upgradeability. Therefore, this board is the best you can get at the moment. It's got every feature you can imagine including firewire, 2 Gbit lan ports, 7.1 Sound, SATA RAID, and most important: SLI which gives you the possibility to add 2 PCI Express cards. Did you notice it's got the nForce4 chipset ? ;)
Memory:
- Kingston Valueram 2048MB Kit (2*1024MB) PC3200 DDR LFT Warranty
Price: €522
You can find faster memory out there but I didn't want to overdo things too much so having a kit of Dual memory that counts up to 2GB of ram is enough already if you ask me.
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Vidcard:
- ASUS EAX800XT HDTV Radeon X800XT 256DDR PCIE16 TV-out DVI HDTV VIVO
Price: €751
A Radeon X800XT with 256MB DDR3 on PCI-express packed with features gives you more than enough gaming performance. Add to that the fact that if you want some more you just have to add a second one in your machine and you know this beast is capable of running everything you would want. If you're more interested in Doom3-based cards, get a PCI-express version of the GeForce 6800 Ultra
Soundcard:
- Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro
Price: €251
The sound quality of the Audigy 2 ZS combined with a breakout box that lets you connect tons of different musical devices. This is about the best you can get for gaming
Harddisk:
- WD Raptor WD740GD 8MB 73,4GB SATA150 10000RPM
Price: €198
It's not cheap but it's the fastest IDE disk in the world. Get this disk and install Windows on it, you'll see the speedboost immediately. Ok, there's not a lot of room on it but that's not what the Raptor is for.
To get an additional speed increase, get a second one of these and put them in RAID configuration
To get an additional speed increase, get a second one of these and put them in RAID configuration
[imglnk]32352[/imglnk]
Harddisk 2:
- Maxtor Maxline Plus III 300GB 7200RPM 16MB SATA150 (7B300S0)
Price: €236
As second disk you need lots of space and 300GB seems enough at the moment. This new Maxline Plus III disk adds to that 16MB of cache and you can be sure that even for a data disk, it's blistering fast
[imglnk]32352[/imglnk]
Optical Drive:
- Plextor PX-116A DVD 16X/48X IDE Black OEM
Price: €37
When it comes to optical drives, Plextor is the king and this dvd reader is good enough for any system
[imglnk]36284[/imglnk]
DVD Writer:
- ASUS DRW-1604P Dual Layer DVD+/-R/RW 16X/4X/16X IDE Black Retail
Price: €97
Plextor is the king when it comes to optical drives but their Dual Layer writer isn't available everywhere yet so we go for this model from Asus that also has what it takes and doesn't even come at a too high cost
[imglnk]36284[/imglnk]
Total price: €3.349,00
When I see the price I know I'll never spend that much on a computer. On the other hand, there are people that do and when you really want the best of the best, this is the price class you have to take into consideration. Remember also that if you want to have it all at once, you can add a second PCI Express card, a second Raptor and a Second Maxtor 300GB Maxline III disk. That would mean of course adding another 1.185,00 euro's to the already big budget.
Anyway, there are people that buy hi-end pc's from VoodooPC and Alienware which also come at this price so I'm sure there are enough people out there that have the money to buy this system :)
All prices are taken from CrazyCamel.com, a Belgian online retailer
In other news:
6 Comment(s)
Zwan
2 Geforce 6800GT's in SLI, overclocked to Ultra speeds, wil own an X800XT in virtually anything and it only costs about 250€ more. Peanuts for an Extreme system if you ask me. If you want the best, you go for GF6, speedier and features SM3.0
But hey, that's just me :)
Speed
2 GT's in SLI will own X800XT, yes. But then again if you don't count money, why not put 2 X800XT's and you will have the fastest DX9 system available ? And you don't even NEED to overclock
Again, as stated in my original post, if you want D3-engine performance then you should go for 6800 Ultra (which isn't available on PCI-E yet over here as I would have chosen that if available)
goeroezeboe (old)
Since you don't want to use a crap mouse or lousy speakers with a system like this you have to add atleast 200 more euros.
Zwan
Btw you can generalize. OpenGL (not only Doom3) performance is just waaay stronger on NV40, and the differences in DX9.0 (Half-Life 2 not included, the ATI-nVidia deal remember?) are marginal.
X800XT PE needs to be compared to 6800UE btw (450Mhz/1.2Ghz) and X800XT to GF6800U (400Mhz/1.1Ghz). The both perform almost the same, but then again the X800XT only needs 1 molex and is single slot.
Zwan
Speed
Oh, and you CAN put an X800XT together with a 6800 Ultra (not easy but doable) on this board.