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KT-7 RAID, Athlon Thunderbird Gaming System Build
by Len "Viking1" HjalmarsonEvery year establishes its own unique benchmarks for hardware in simulation history. The introduction of the Celeron in 1998 is noteworthy. The introduction of the AMD Athlon and Nvidia's GeForce were the benchmarks for 1999. Not to be outdone, 2000 is about to establish its own hardware history.
The year 2000 will likely go down in simulation history for the introduction of the Celeron II and AMD's own version of a low budget powerhouse, the Duron. Intel's Celeron II sports a PIII core with SIMD instructions. AMD's Duron sports the Athlon core with full speed on die cache, but like the Celeron, reduced cache size.
AMD's Duron deserves special note for two reasons, however. First, it does not have the reduced registers of Intel's Celeron line. Intel's Celeron II is hamstrung by reduced cache as well as reduced registers. AMD's Duron has only the reduced cache.
But second, and even more significant for budget gamers, the Duron is CHEAP and even more overclockable than the Celeron II. The average Duron 600 can be run at 900MHz and more, and costs only about $55 US!! With almost as much horsepower as AMD's flagship Thunderbird, that is one under-priced CPU.
While I was greatly tempted to pocket the extra cash and build a new system with the AMD Duron, I decided instead that my second and final upgrade of 2000 should be full bore with the latest AMD Thunderbird. I shelled out $155 US for the Thunderbird 800, knowing full well that the CPU can usually be clocked at 1GHz or better. In fact, I am running my new machine at 990MHz, though I have run it as high as 1050MHz.
WCPU ID
Mainboard Power
The components I chose for my new system are all new to the gaming market this year, with the exception of the drives. The list is as follows:
- Abit KT-7 RAID mainboard (ATA 100)
- AMD Thunderbird 800MHz
- Micron CAS2 PCI 133 (192MB)
- Nvidia GF2 GTS 32MB
- Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound board
- Twin Quantum Fireball Plus LM 15MB (ATA 66)
- Kenwood Zen 50x CD
- Chrome Orb heatsink and fan
- alternate - Alpha PAL 6035 heatsink and fan
In addition, I have two other fans in my mid tower ATX case: a standard 3" case input fan, and a slot style output fan. The power supply is 300 watts, to handle the extra hard drive and offer the possibility of active cooling or a new CPU in 2001.
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