Workstation rebuild complete :D
So I finally finished the workstation rebuild, and it's looking good!
I ordered 3 new main parts for this.
- The excellent dual core, 64 bit AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core 4800+ CPU
- The ultra cool Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard with passive chipset cooling
- Graphics powered by the very powerful ATI based Club 3D X1900XT 512MB PCI-E card
Oh, and 2GB of DDR400 RAM :)
As I mentioned in
yesterdays post, the reason I consider these rebuilds so important is that they force me to familiarize myself with new stuff on the market. The big challenge/surprise for me this time was the whole Nvidia SLI vs. ATI Crossfire thing.
The way I normally choose my components is by starting with the CPU, then let that dictate which mobos I choose between, which in turn decides the memory, etc.
This time however, I discovered that the graphics card decision also affects the chipset/mobo decision. Well, it does if you ever plan to add another card, at least. For me that wasn't a big deal, as I can't afford to add another card anytime soon anyway. But I was thinking that sometime down the line adding a similar second hand card could be a cheap way to extend the life of the setup.
But dual card setups these days are dependant on chipset support - if you want SLI with two Geforce cards you need a chipset with SLI support (in practice a NForce4), and if you want Crossfire with two Radeon cards you need a chipset with Crossfire support (which means an ATI chipset).
To complicate matters (for themselves, mostly), to set up a dual ATI system, one of the boards must be a Crossfire edition master card. That instantly lowers the appeal of the system as there's bound to be a lot fewer of those second hand around than 'just' another Geforce 7800GTX in a few years. So despite the ATI x1900xt comes out on top in reviews both in single and dual setups at the time I make the order, I'm aiming for the Geforce 7800GTX. That is, until I find out Nvidia expects me to pay €250 MORE for a inferior performing card! No way, I refuse to get conned.
However, despite logic telling me I should now get a ATI based motherboard, I just couldn't find a motherboard with the featureset of some of the nForce4 based mobos out there. I briefly considered the
MSI A8N Diamond Plus, mainly because of the onboard Creative soundcard, but I chickend out and went for my alltime favourite mobo maker Asus instead.
That's how I ended up with the rather eccentric solution of a nForce4 SLI16 based mobo and a x1900xt graphics card.
Phew, I'm tired... guess I'll do the OS install and post some pics tomorrow.
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