My July PC - building a high end machine

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Technology is developing so fast that anyone with a minimal understanding of what is happening, knows that personal computers have now achieved a power that allows them to bring out the best in any media, from music to video.

All the music you listen, all the videos you watch, all the books you read, etc... are possible thanks to computers. What is kind of new is that the user attitude towards the computer, is changing from client to producer, in the sense that more and more people use computers NOT JUST to watch, listen and read stuff authored by someone else, but to CREATE their own media.

In fact, there is so much affordable technology these days, that you can build a PC that is capable of being the absolute center of your world. That is what I am doing. I want a MONSTER PC. I want a machine that allows me to watch tv, while word processing; a machine that allows me to listen from one thousand different albums, at a mouse's touch; a PC that can record digital video and then dump it to optical storage, avoiding the quality loss that happens with magnetic supports; a machine that gives me the chance to go drive a 1967 F1, fly a Boeing 737, relive second World War adventures and even emulate alien hardware, from the ZX Spectrum to the Nintendo 64... And much more...

It is possible to have such a PC, mixing the right hardware and the right software. This article is hardware specifics oriented, so, about the software, I'll just write that the only Operating System that can (currently) really handle my needs, is Microsoft's Windows 2000.

The most stressing need I imposed in the paragraphs above, is producing digital video; in fact it is producing real time digital video with compression... which is something quite processor intensive, meaning that if you want to do it and still have a machine that can do almost anything else, while encoding the video stream, then you must go multi-processor.

I did go multi-processor, and that was quite an adventure for someone like me, who had never, ever, seen a multi-processor machine, let alone built one. After a careful price watch, I decided the wisest choice to do was going DUAL Pentium 3 @ 733 MHz / 133 MHz FSB.

Why dual? Because quad or more, would be awfully expensive for my budget, plus I wouldn't know where to buy it. Notice that all the hardware I'll be listing here, was bought on the same day, same hour, from the same store, with no problems whatsoever.

Why the P3 @ 733 / 133 MHz? Because it was the best performance / cost choice available. Notice that the P3 @ 733 / 100 is probably more expensive these days (!), due to the market's (relative) small offer of motherboards with 133 MHz front bus support.

In order to handle the dual P3s, I bough a TYAN TIGER-133 motherboard, model S1834, featuring VIA's Apollo 133A Pro chipset. Why a VIA board? Well, INTEL's i820 and i840 chipsets, which do support the 133 MHz FSB, have bugs related to memory addressing, that would affect my memory needs (1 GB)... Plus, the S1834 supports all my other requests: AGP 4x, 6 PCI slots, 4 usable DIMMs of PC 100 or PC 133 memory, hardware monitoring chip, UDMA66, and NO extra crap onboard, such as audio and SCSI controllers (which I prefer to buy after).

To be honest, TYAN's S1834, is the ONLY motherboard I know of, that supports all the aforementioned stuff. Try to find an alternative...

So, this is my machine's core. How much memory do I fit in? 1 GB RAM. No less. No more. After much efforts, the most I physically loaded it, was 552 MB, with some 200 processes running @ the same time :)

Which graphics card? Ah, this one is so interesting, that I decided to write a self-contained article to it (check the 200700 update). But, straight to the point, after reading many magazines and many websites, I thought I had no other choice, than a NVIDIA GeForce 2 based card. After a positive experience with a GeForce 256 DDR (Creative Labs' Annihilator), I decided to go for its successor, the "CL GeForce 2 GTS"... but I am now running a 3DFX Voodoo 5 5500 AGP... why? Oh, you must wait until the article :)

Storage? I need plenty of storage. I hate having to change CD-ROMs... so I checked what was available. and went for:

2 Maxtor Diamond Max Plus IDE ATA66 - 40.2 GB @ 7200 rpm hard disks

2 Maxtor Diamond Max IDE ATA66 60 GB @ 5400 rpm hard disks

1 Western Digital SCSI Ultra 2 Wide - 18.3 GB @ 10.000 rpm hard disk

The 40 GB monsters are for data that benefit a lot from F-A-S-T reads and writes: digital video and video games, for example.

The 60 GB monsters are for "passive" data: books, mp3 files, video already encoded, etc...

The 18.3 GB beauty, that runs at 10K rpm and has an exhaust pipe (kidding?- not quite!), is for storing the operating system and all its the software, except for games.

Price and reliability, as sensed from previous experiences, were my major criterions. There will be articles about all the HDs.

The TYAN S1834 includes ATA66 controllers for all the IDE devices, but then I required a SCSI controller. My option?- The ADAPTEC 2940 U2W, that handles 2 buses: a regular SCSI one, and a 68 pins Ultra Wide SCSI 2 LVD (low voltage differential) sprinter, that I exclusively dedicate to the Western Digital 10K rpm gear.

Networking? Yes, I have heavy network needs, because I recycle all my hardware, thus having built many (single processor) PCs, over time :)

I use two network cards:

1 Adaptec ANA 69011 TX NIC

1 Addtron AEF-380TXD NIC

both are 10 / 100 Mbps hardware, but the Adaptec has port aggregation technology, and - I've found over time - is strangely less compatible with some old NICs. I use the Adaptec for connecting to a 3COM CMX Cable Modem (that allows data rates up to 3 Mbps... - imagine having an ISP that allows you to surf the Internet with all that bandwidth...). The Addtron is for regular LAN traffic.

TV and video capture on the PC? Well, I still didn't jump to the DV bandwagon and I am not going to write about the high quality external devices that I use, but I am quite happy with an unexpensive Pinnacle PCTV card, that has a mono cable tv tuner, supporting up to 130 channels. I get great picture quality out of it, and I will soon be upgrading it to stereo and radio support.

Audio? The answer is the Sound Blaster Live Platinum, with the LiveDrive II. I once wrote a (portuguese) article on the LIVE! hardware, so if you are interested on knowing how I feel about it, jump here.

I also have a secondary VGA adapter: the 3DFX Voodoo 3000 PCI, the fastest PCI VGA hardware ever built... until the upcoming Voodoo 5 5500. I had a REAL need for it, when using the GeForce on the AGP bus, but now I am really not needing it. All this stuff requires plenty of power and ventilating. I am using a GREAT Enlight ATX EN8900 case, with dual intelligent 300 W power supplies... but this case, the way I arrange the hardware inside, is no longer enough (I don't have space for installing a floppy disk drive :)

I'll have case news, soon, though will NOT be changing from the wonderful Enlight! So how am I gonna do it? Mystery.

That is my new PC.