New PC for Martin

Last week a friend decided that he wants a new PC. Therefor I looked up a possible configuration and sent him details.
He liked it, so he ordered it and finally last weekend I assembled it.
The Thing cost 496€ and its components are:

• AMD Phenom X4 9550 Sockel-AM2+ boxed, 4x 2.20GHz
• Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Single-Slot, 512MB GDDR4, 2x DVI, TV-out, PCIe 2.0
• Gigabyte GA-MA790X-DS4, 790X
  
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB 16MB
• Kingston KIT 2048MB DDR2 1066
• Power supply 500W

The components are not the most expensive one, but also not the cheapest one. That was one of the challenges. Some will ask, why AMD? The answer is simple. First of all, AMD Quadcore is a real Quadcore, not like Intels 2 * 2 Core. If you want details on that, Google it or visit Parallel Computing at LUT *g*.

But I'm a nice guy, so here are some infos in form of pictures,
first the picture of the real Quadcore of AMD:

And here is the Intel "Quadcore":


Do you see the difference?
Correct! In Intels Quadcore 2 cores always share one Level 2 Cache. And thats why it is not a real Quadcore, it is a 2 * 2 Core.

I know that AMD is at the moment 10% slower than compareable Intels, but I trust in AMD to solve this with a bios update.
Another advantage is the new platform. It supports PCI-e 2.0 and Hyperthreading 3 and it is the only platform which does at the moment.
So, why did I choose ATI card? AMD == ATI, so ATI is best supported on that platform, including Crossfire.

You don't know what Crossfire is, crossfire is the "same" as Nvidias SLI, you can combine the graphical power of two or even four graphic cards, here some pictures for a better understanding:




I wanted to build the components in the old case, but unfortunately the old PC was a microATX board, so was the case. So we used one of the older cases he got. Normally there are not really problems in putting together components, but there have been some in this example.

First the PC booted and the XP Setup started, but I had no Sata driver disk, so I had to start again with the driver floppy. But from there on, it didn't boot anymore, always stopped at startup. So I tried a lot of stuff including a bios update. It worked again and the Setup started, but only until "Windows checks the hardware configuration ....". I again tried some configuration in the bios and in the end it worked.

We installed all the necessary software and very important for Martin, his racing games. The graphic was awesome, it really makes hell lot of difference to before. In the end all took us from lunch at 13 until 23 in the evening....... nice waste of time ;)
I want a QUADCORE TOOOOOOO !!!!! ;(