Specifications

on your system. So we added a third, more conventional Max-
tor DiamondMax Plus 9—a 200
GB parallel ATA hard drive—
to give us lots of capacity for digital media, where blazing
speed is not required.
The
ATI Radeon 9800 has 256MB of video RAM and cur-
rently wears the 3-D performance crown. On the audio side,
we chose the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2, a full-
featured sound card suitable for all but the highest-end audio
workstations. All that audio quality isn’t worth much if you
can’t move the air molecules, though, and we chose the Cre-
ative MegaWorks
THX 6.1 650 speaker system for its overall
excellence for home theater, gaming, and music. To be sure,
we beefed up the center channel by replacing the original
with a three-way unit from Cambridge SoundWorks.
Speaking of home theater, the Samsung SyncMaster 1200
NF
display is 22 inches of high-resolution heaven, approaching the
size of some den
TVs. The monitor weighs a crushing 69.3lb,
but
CRT is still the way to go for the highest-performance
graphics, and it offers better image quality for 3-D graphics
than a flat-panel display.
Optical-drive duties are handled admirably by the Sony
DRU510ADVDR/RW/CD drive, which supports the four most
popular recordable-
DVD formats (and recordable-CD formats)
at the fastest possible speeds. It’s expensive, but it handles just
about every format. We aren’t quite ready to kiss the 3.5-inch
floppy disk goodbye, though, and the generic $10 floppy disk
drive didn’t put too big a hole in our wallet.
The CaseArts Super Flower case has a gorgeous enameled
paint job. Our choice may not be to your taste, but that’s the fun:
You can have pretty much any design you want. Although it has
the all-but-obligatory window in the side, we didn’t opt for any
additional lighting, since the case itself has a tricolor
LED cool-
ing fan in the top. The Antec True480 power supply will stand
up to any use we can think of.
We chose the Logitech Cordless Pro keyboard and the Logi-
tech
MX700 mouse as solid representatives of the current crop.
We’re pretty good at spotting bargains, and we think you’ll find
that the street prices we paid are hard to beat. But after all was
said and done, we’d put a $3,673 dent in our budget.
Abit motherboard has eight USB 2.0 ports, three FireWire ports,
and Gigabit Ethernet support.
A machine in this class uses a much faster front-side bus—
the channel over which the processor communicates with the
other key motherboard chips and memory. The blistering 800-
MHz front-side bus demands special memory, and more is bet-
ter in terms of performance. So we loaded 1
GB of Kingston Hy-
perX
PC3200 memory onto the board. The two DIMMs (dual
inline memory modules), with their blue anodized heat spread-
ers, help to keep the memory cool and reliable.
Serial
ATA (SATA) is the new high-performance standard for
hard drives, and native support (direct on the motherboard, as
opposed to emulated through the
PCI bus) is desirable for max-
imum performance. The Abit motherboard supports
SATA
natively via the Intel ICH5R I/O controller hub. The SATA con-
nectors feed two Western Digital Raptor
WD360 10,000-rpm
SATA hard drives, for a total of 72GB of very fast storage.
As if the high rotational speed weren’t enough, the Raptor
hard drives each have 8
MB of cache. Our RAID 0 configuration
aids performance by reducing latency but provides no data pro-
tection through redundancy. The hard drives look like a single
drive to the system, and they contain the operating system,
cache files, applications, and anything else that we’d normally
put on a C: drive.
Although
SATA hard drives are available in larger sizes, they
get rather pricey, and you don’t need that speed for all the files
BUILD OR BUY: HIGH END
www.pcmag.com SEPTEMBER 16, 2003 PC MAGAZINE
83
HIGH-END SYSTEM
Processor Pentium 4 (3 GHz) $425
Motherboard Abit IC7-G 210
Two 512MB Kingston
Memory HyperX PC3200 DIMMs 242
CPU cooler Vantec AeroFlow VP4-7040 29
Graphics ATI Radeon 9800 (256MB) 510
Hard drive Two Western Digital Raptor WD360s 276
Hard drive One Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 207
Optical drive Sony DRU510A 330
Floppy disk drive Generic 10
Keyboard Logitech Cordless Pro 80
Mouse Logitech MX700 (included with keyboard) 0
Sound card Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 89
Case CaseArts Super Flower 169
Power supply Antec True480 (480W) 73
Operating system Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition 135
System subtotal $ 2,785
Speaker system Creative MegaWorks THX 6.1 650 299
Center channel
speaker Cambridge SoundWorks Newton MC150 99
Monitor Samsung SyncMaster 1200NF 490
Tot al $ 3, 673
A
s you can see from the table below, we were very cost-conscious
when we built our budget system. Using state-of-the-art compo-
nents for the high-end system gave us considerably less latitude,
but you’re still getting a lot for the money.
Our comparison systems were not identically configured, but the
differences affected price and storage capacity more than performance.
The Dell Dimension
XPS included two 120GB SATA hard drives, 1GB of
RAM, and a 19-inch LCD monitor, which ballooned the price to $4,488.
The Alienware Area-51 cost $3,599—configured similarly to the Dell
system but with a
CRT monitor.
BUDGET SYSTEM
Processor Athlon XP 2500+ (1.83 GHz) $90
Motherboard Abit NFS-7 110
Memory Two 256MB Kingston CAS2.5 DIMMs 72
Graphics nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 (128MB) 115
Hard drive Western Digital WD400BB 50
Optical drive Samsung DVD/CD-RW 63
Floppy disk drive Generic 8
Keyboard Dell black 6
Mouse Logitech optical 8
Sound card nVidia nForce2 (built-in) 0
Antec SLK3700AMB
Case with 350W power supply 48
Operating system Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition 85
System subtotal $655
Speaker system Logitech Z-340 (2.1 channels) 30
Monitor ViewSonic E70f 112
Tot al $797
What We Spent