Build a cheap powerful games computer (General Comments on Processors)

Member Name: deecee

Product:	General Comments on Processors
Date:	12/10/00 (291 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap

Disadvantages: None so far

Cheap Powerful gaming computer for £500 or less


This is a brief article on how I built myself a great games
machine .
My old Pentium 3 - 450 / Voodoo 3 - 2000 unit was struggling with
the modern games , my F1 cars were behaving more like Nova's and
Lara Croft was sagging a bit and looking breathless so I decided
I needed something more powerful but didn't want to spend more
than £500.
I checked out the available processors and graphics cards and
their performance characteristics etc on the net , Pentiums were
way to expensive and under performed , Athlons were better but
still on the expensive side , then those clever AMD people came
out with the Duron CPU , these looked good on paper so I decided
this was the CPU, price was going to decide the size .
Next area I looked at was Graphics cards, this basically came
down to three , 3dfx Voodoo , Riva TNT 2 , or Geeforce . The
only affordable 3dfx card that was better than what I had was the
3-3500 but this was on the expensive side and didn't give a huge
performance increase for the money . The Riva looked good but
again I didn't feel it gave a big enough bang for the bucks ,
Geeforce looked to be the one to have as it gave a huge hike in
performance but at a huge cost , Geeforce 2 was way to expensive
but Geeforce 256 I thought was possible with careful shopping ,
also because of the way Geeforce works in taking the load off the
processor, I decided this would offset the smaller power
characteristics of the Duron against the Athlon .
Ok I had decided what the main spec was going to be, now I looked
at the rest of the system , after checking performance V price of
mainboards I decided an MSI 6330 mobo was the one , it was
cheaper than the Gigabyte, ASUS and Abit boards everyone was
raving about yet shared the same chipset , it would also provide
a decent on board soun
d system saving the cost of a sound card .
to get the best out of the board and CPU I would need to get rid
of my PC100 memory and replace it with PC133 .
I checked out Hard disks etc and found I could get a 13 Gig 7200
rpm disk for the price of a 20 gig 5400 rpm disk , as I valued
performance more than space I went for the smaller but faster
disk .
Lastly I would need the 300 w power supply all Athlons and Durons
require to get the best out of them .
Ok I had my spec now I had to buy the parts , this involved going
to a computer fair looking for bargains and offers and waiting
around till prices dropped (as the day goes on prices drop
through competition ) , I got a great bargain with a Geeforce for
£95 and managed to buy all I needed including a new case with
300w power supply for £503 ( ok so what's £3 between friends) ,
feeling very pleased with myself I took it all home and had it
assembled and loaded in 4 hours . I then went on the net and
downloaded the latest Bios and drivers for the mainboard and
Geeforce etc , my build spec was as follows :-
Case inc 300w power supply £30
MSI 6330 mobo + Duron 700 + fan £185
Geeforce £95
128 meg PC133 £95
13 gig Hard disk £65
Floppy £8
52x CD £25
OK moment of truth , its built, its running , it appears faster
than my P3 but how much faster , for performance testing I use
3dMark by Mad Onion . com , my P3 had a 3Dmark of 2287 .
3dMark was run at default settings and gave me a 3dMark of 3608
. WOW was I pleased especially when I compared performance
against a friends Athlon 750 / VooDoo 3500 combo which had a
3dMark of 3377 . Now my F1 cars go VROOM and an uplifted Lara
now leaves ME breathless .
Alas there is a downside to all this , three weeks after building
the unit AMD announced that they are dropping their prices by up
to 50% BooHoo !!!!!! my timing was crap

Summary: