Traditionally the speed of the processor is defined by it clock speed, but
that is often not very certain because different developers can pack more
performance into fewer clock cycles (Stephen 289). However to reach good gaming
performance, today’s CPU needs a clock speed of 400 MHz or more, which
eliminates selection below that point. The two major manufacturers making high
performing processors are Intel and AMD. Both producers have selection of low
and high price range CPUs between one hundred dollars up to one thousand
dollars. Intel Celeron is one of the good performing and low priced CPUs, but
compared to higher priced Intel Pentium II/III Celeron does not perform quite as
well . The reason why Celeron is not as fast as Pentium II/III, is no presence,
or low amount of cache memory. Cache memory is a very fast type of memory where
data is temporary stored to avoid accessing slower RAM or hard drive. Older CPUs
such as Pentium were using cache memory implemented on the motherboard; newer
processors have cache memory installed on them, which makes the data transfer
faster. AMD- advanced micro devices, as Intel’s largest competitor is known for
providing well- designed and highly compatible processors. Currently to compete
with Intel, AMD sells two good performing types of processors. The highly
priced, and great performing AMD K7-Anthlon, and the “Celeron competition” AMD
K6. The Anthlon CPU in most benchmarks performs better than its clock speed
equivalent from Intel (Hwang 1). After selecting CPU next thing to consider is
motherboard. There is a wide selection of motherboards, but only few well
performing and high compatible.
Abit is one of the well-known mainboard manufacturers, their policy has
always been to provide greatest flexibility and feature set available. Their
fair priced Abit BX6 rev. 2.0 features five PCI slots, two ISA and one AGP. BX6
supports up to one gigabyte of RAM, and is compatible with all Intel’s Slot -
one processor, making it an excellent choice for Intel’s CPUs (Hwang 1). If AMD
K7- Anthlon is the choice for CPU, outstanding MSI MS-61-67 is a high quality
mainboard supporting all Anthlon CPUs, and providing same as Abit BX6, five PCI,
and two ISA slots. AGP slot is implemented as well. MS 61-67 supports up to 768
megabytes of random access memory, which provides plenty of upgrading options.
The mainboard also provides “Plug and Play” BIOS which detects the peripheral
devices and expansion cards of the board automatically(Hwang 3). A good graphic
card is one the most important things to consider while building a gaming
computer. 3Dfx Voodoo3 is one of the best performing graphic cards available on
the market (Vederman 204).
Its impressive test results in Glide interface based
games are unbeatable by any other graphic card, just because 3Dfx is the only
manufacturer using Glide interfacing. Using other interfaces such as Open GL or
Direct 3D the Voodoo 3 3500 looses speed compare to TNT 2 Ultra based
accelerators. One of the features of the high priced Voodoo3 3500 is a TV tuner
that allows user to watch television on computers monitor (Case 49) . Voodoo 3
supports all three interfaces- Open GL, Glide, and Direct 3D which makes it one
of the fastest, and most compatible graphic cards available. Only sixteen
megabytes of graphic memory does not allow Voodoo3 to run true color, three
dimensional scenes in high resolutions, and that is what Nvidia TNT 2 Ultra does
(Case 204). Several graphic card manufacturers use TNT 2 Ultra chipset. Well
known, and one of the largest is Diamond Multimedia producing Viper 770 Ultra,
using previously mentioned TNT 2 Ultra chipset. Viper 770 is a very fast graphic
accelerator with implemented thirty-two megabytes of graphic memory, allowing
true coloring in high resolutions. Retail version of the Viper includes a large
software bundle with several valuable games. Another feature is an excellent
toolbar that allows the user to tweak up a lot of details improving performance,
such as an overclocking utility (Case 99).
