Specifications

BUILD OR BUY: HIGH END
www.pcmag.com SEPTEMBER 16, 2003 PC MAGAZINE
87
Attach the CD
and S/PDIF
audio cables to
the sound card.
We kept the official tests for our DIY systems
simple: Business Winstone 2002 and Multime-
dia Content Creation Winstone 2003. These
test suites give a comprehensive overview of a
system’s performance. Business Winstone
measures the speed of tasks such as word
processing, spreadsheets, and everyday interactions with
the
PC, while Content Creation Winstone evaluates the
speed of streaming, compression, and file conversion.
Our high-end system posted some of the best scores
we’ve ever seen for a 3-
GHz system, for both business
and content creation tasks. It consistently bested the
other high-end systems we selected for comparison,
thanks to careful matching of top-of-the-line compo-
nents and a dual Raptor
SATA hard drive configuration.
Many high-end
DIY systems are used for gaming, and
we compared our system with the Dell Dimension
XPS,
which is aimed at gamers. The
PCs had identical proces-
sors, bus speeds, video cards, and
RAM configurations,
and predictably, they were within a heartbeat of one
another—well within the margin of error—on all of our
informal gaming tests.
We also compared our high-end
PC with the Alienware
Area-51, which has a wild-looking case and hot innards.
The Area-51 performed very similarly to our home brew.
We don’t expect a budget system to slay dragons, but
we’re happy when it performs respectably. Our Athlon
XP 2500+–based system was well off the pace of the
Pentium 4 machine on content creation but did remark-
ably well on business tasks. The Athlon
XP, with its
shorter instruction pipeline, is typically better at
branchy business applications, while the
P4 blows it
away for large, content-oriented tasks.
Investing in a decent midrange video card gave us
respectable graphics performance—far better than what
you would expect from an $800 off-the-shelf system.
We compared our budget machine with a widely avail-
able, low-cost commercial
PC, the eMachines T2482. The
T2482 had a slightly slower Athlon XP 2400+ but twice
the hard drive space, and we increased its 256
MB of RAM
to 512MB. Still, it couldn’t come close to the performance
of our budget system.—Analysis written by Bill Machrone
DIY Does Well
PERFORMANCE TESTS
High scores are best.
Bold type denotes first place.
Processor
Business
Winstone
2002
Multimedia
Content Creation
Winstone 2003
Home-built
budget system
Athlon XP 2500+
(1.83 GHz)
33.6 40.4
Home-built
high-end system
Pentium 4 (3 GHz) 38.3 53.1
Alienware Area-51* Pentium 4 (3 GHz) 37.0 51.8
Dell Dimension XPS* Pentium 4 (3 GHz) 35.9 51.5
eMachines T2482*
Athlon XP 2400+
(2 GHz)
23.0 32.0
* Reported for comparison.
BUILT vs. BOUGHT
Install the Graphics Card
Install the Sound Card
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The ATI Radeon 9800,
like many other high-end
graphics cards, requires a
separate connection from
the power supply, because
the card uses more current
than the AGP slot can
provide. Our Radeon 9800
uses the full-size 4-pin hard
drive connector; others may
use the smaller, floppy disk
drive–style power cable.
Locate the AGP slot on
the motherboard; it is the
expansion slot closest
to the CPU, set back
farther from the rear of
the case than the PCI
connectors. Align the
graphics card with the slot
and press it down firmly.
Screw the card down with
the correct screw.
Locate a free PCI slot and
align the sound card’s edge
connector with the PCI
slot. Gently push straight
down on the sound card
until it seats, then fasten
it into place with a screw.
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