| System created to be the most bang for the buck. This would be a killer gaming system. In about 2 months the powers that be will release the Geforce 4 cards having 128 MB DDR (twice as powerful as the XBOX!) These will set you back about $350-400. The cool thing is that the Geforce 3 Ti 500 cards will become affordable. Don't get me wrong though the above video card is a kick ass card. The next logical step up would be the Geforce 3 Ti-500. Go to the portal to check out all the benchmarks to see for yourself. Intel is finally getting with the plan and using DDR ram. I think you'll see their RAMBUS, go by the wayside. |
| Motherboard: Cpu: Memory: Hard Drive: Floppy Drive: Sound Card: CD-Rom: CD-RW: Video Card: Modem: OS: Case: Total: |
| ASUS A7V 266 Athlon XP Palomino 1700+ (1.47 GHz) Micron 256 MB PC2100 DDR Seagate Barracuda 40GB 7200RPM Sony Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy ASUS 52X Plextor Plexwriter 16X10X40 Visiontek Xtasy 5864 Geforce 2 Ti 64 MB DDR Pheobe Luna Express 56Kv.90 Windows XP Home Edition Future Power Opal 400/Mid Tower/2 USB/400 W Power Supply |
| 149.16 130.90 76.16 94.64 11.44 67.00 38.76 135.60 144.78 14.38 99.44 44.55 1006.81 |
| Most bang for the buck: Computers Near 1000 |
| If your confused about how graphics cards compare to one another, let me try to clear it up for you. Here is a great chart that benchmarks just about every type of card you could think of. The game that the tests were run on is called Aquanox. It is much more graphically intense than a game like Quake 3 or Unreal. Here is the Setup. Here is the Chart. |
| I find it very interesting that the Athlon Thunderbird 1.33 GHz hangs in there with the Pentium 4 1.8 Ghz on the above benchmarks. The $1006 dollar computer with the Palomino chip would edge the 1.8 GHz Pentium 4. (AND ITS CHEAPER!) If you want the straight poop or want to see the ultra powerful systems go head to head in running real world applications and games. To read about all 19 tests click Here. For the Quake 3 results click here. You'll see that at higher resolutions even the Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47 GHz) edges the Pentium 4 2.0 GHz!!!! At the time I'm writing this 1.26.2002 the price of the XP 1700+ costs $130.20 and the Pentium 4 2.0 cost $425.22. That's nearly $300 difference! The top end processors are as follows: Athlon Palomino XP 2000+ = $330.27 (1.67 Ghz) Intel Pentium 4 2.2 GHz = $652.08 (2.2 Ghz) Wanna see the big boys go at it. Here is the full article on the most powerful processors in full contact, bare knuckle action. It seems as Intel's gloves are coming off as the results favor the Pentium 4 chip. Don't forget the speeds of the processors. 2.2-1.67 = a difference of 530 MHz. Naturally Pentium should win. But shouldn't they be much much faster? Here is the result on Quake 3. Read the conclusion about the future of Intel chips. Here is gamespots version of the same topic. |