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Last Updated:
27 July 2008
In this category of personal computers the main priority is the ability
to run games software like Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004, etc. with a
good gamer's experience. Gamers hate jerky graphics performance or long
load times between gameplay sessions Price has always been
the number one concern of most Malaysian PC buyers and the gaming PC is
no exception.
As a result of
this, it is not unusual for gamers to economise by purchasing a CPU of
lower clock speed and overclocking it to a higher frequency to achieve
better performance. So here we have a guide for the gamer and
overclocker.
System
Platform
With the Athlon 64, AMD is now widely regarded as the platform for
gamers. Most would agree that the AMD Athlon 64's performance in gaming
is superior to a similarly priced Intel Pentium 4 CPU.
Mainboard:
MSI K8N Neo Platinum (nVIDIA® nForce3 250Gb Chipset) CPU:
AMD Athlon™ 64 3000+ processor in a box
Approximate Retail Price: RM 1,055
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The K8N
Neo Platinum stood out as a high performance, reasonably priced
mainboard. Perhaps even more important to an overclocker, the
K8N Neo Platinum allows overclockers to achieve high memory
performance when overclocked. The K8N Neo Platinum will not be
the weak link in any overclocking excercise.
The K8N Neo Platinum impresses with a full implementation of the
features of the nForce3-250Gb/Ultra including fast on-chip LAN,
any-drive RAID that allows IDE and SATA hard drives to be
combined in RAID arrays, and an on-chip Firewall. The feature
set compares well to any Socket 754 on the market and will not
disappoint.
For the best overclocking experience, you can count on a working
AGP/PCI lock with adjustments from 66 to 100, CPU multipliers
from 4X to 20X, You also get a full range of voltage adjustments
- vCore to 1.85V, memory voltage to 2.85V, and vAGP to 1.85V.
This is even a board for the novice overclocker, since there are
automatic overclocking selections in Core Cell that set
everything for you. You just choose the % overclock from 1% to
11% and the board does the rest. |
With most recent Athlon 64 reaching around 2.5GHz or higher, the
task was finding an A64 that gave great value and also had a
real history of significant overclocking. AMD, like Intel, has
different flavors of A64 available at the same clock frequency.
It was pretty easy to see that the 3000+ offered great value and
great overclocking abilities.
The Athlon 64 3000+ is now reasonably priced and should be
considered by every gamer or overclocker as a basis of their
gaming or overclocking rig.
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Graphics Card & Memory
Graphics Card: Asus V9999/TD (127 MB RAM)
Memory: Corsair TwinX 1GB (512x2) DDR400 CL2
Approximate Retail Price: RM 2,270
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While the dust is still settling in this round of the video
wars, we do know that the new generation of video cards from
nVidia and ATI are twice as fast as the previous generation in
many benchmarks. We also found in our testing of the new nVidia
nForce3-250 chipset that it performs a bit better with an nVidia
graphics card. With that in mind, we included a GeForce 6800 in
our gamer and overclocking system to match the nForce3-250 based
MSI K8N Neo Platinum. |
Corsair
is well known for its high performance memory. Although Socket
754 mainboards do not support dual channel architecture, having
a matched pair means that you won't need to get new RAM when you
upgrade to a Socket 939 mainboard. 1 GB RAM is almost a standard
for gaming PCs and the Corsair RAM delivers both performance and
reasonable cost.
If you
intend to overclock your system, Corsair TwinX is also available
in DDR 500 speed grades. |
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