34 MA XIMUMPC SEPTEMBER 2004
PSU: PC Power and
Cooling Turbo Cool
510 Deluxe Express
We lecture so often on the virtues of
using a high-quality power supply that we
sometimes feel like a schoolteacher—or a
parent lecturing a child. We were reminded
why we constantly harp on the topic while
configuring this year’s Dream Machine.
During our initial Dream Machine
forays, we got the machine up and run-
ning with a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
processor, a next-gen PCI Express vid-
eocard, 1GB of RAM, and two Western
Digital Raptors drives. But when we
upgraded to the Prescott Pentium 4 and
the GeForce FX 6800 Ultra, the machine
wouldn’t boot. What the hell happened?
Not enough power, baby—our original
so-called 460-watt PSU couldn’t hack it,
even in the cool environs of the Lab. So
we asked PC Power and Cooling to send
us one of its Turbo Cool 510 units with the
new 24-bit main power connector and a
six-pin videocard power connector.
We’re convinced that two factors let us
get within the range of 4GHz: the CPU’s
beefier Thermaltake heatsink and the
reliable power from the Turbo Cool 510
Deluxe. You’re taking notes, right?
http://www.pcpowerandcooling.comVideocards: Radeon
X800 XT Platinum
Edition and All-in-
Wonder VE
Choosing the perfect
videocard for the
Dream Machine
is never easy.
This year, it
was especially
and excruciatingly
difficult. After much soul
searching, endless roundsof benchmarking, the discovery of a few
ugly driver bugs, and about 200 cups of
coffee, we all came to agreement on a
one-two punch of videocard glory—the
PCI Express Radeon X800 XT Platinum
Edition and the PCI All-in-Wonder VE.
The PCI Express version of the X800 XT
Platinum Edition represents the future of
videocard technology, but its PCI Express
chops are not what earned it Dream
Machine status. Oh, no! Instead, the deal
was clinched with the X800’s kick-ass per-
formance in pixel and vertex shader
games and its svelte one-slot formfactor—
this year’s Dream Machine is short on PCI
slots, so it was crucial we use just a single
slot for our videocard.
Dig these numbers: 81.7 frames
per second in Halo. 13,410 3D Marks.
We’ve seen very few videocards come
close, and we were able to achieve
these scores without any major over-
clocking—we nudged the GPU core up
to 546MHz and the 256MB of GDDR3
memory up to 565MHz (from 520MHz
core/560MHz memory).
The other half of our dynamic duo,
and the driving force behind our front-
mounted LCD touch screen, is ATI’s
old-school All-in-Wonder VE—the only
PCI videocard (from ATI) we could find
in today’s fast-paced world of AGP and
PCI Express. The TV tuner in the card is
a bonus but it was not a primary factor
in our decision. Also, we’ve found that
when using more than one videocard in
a system, it works best if they both use
the same driver. ATI and nVidia cards
generally don’t play well together.
http://www.ati.comMemory: Crucial
1GB PC-4200U
DDR2/533
What happens when Intel
pushes a new memory stan-
dard and invests $450 million
in a RAM manufacturer? Mighty
fast RAM, that’s what. Such is the case
with the Micron/Intel relationship,
which was designed to spur
production of DDR2 memory
chips. And because Crucial
Technology is the direct seller
of Micron RAM, you can’t get
any closer to the source. For
this year’s Dream Machine, we
selected a pair of the company’s
1GB DDR2-533 DIMMs because of
their speed and because they overclock
like crazy. Using the pair of 1GB DIMMSalso keeps two memory slots free for
additional RAM—because you never
know when you may need to move up to
the 2GB mark.
http://www.crucial.comPrimary storage:
74GB Western Digital
740GD Raptor
Jurassic Park taught us that the
Velociraptor was a pack hunter, so it
makes sense that Western Digital’s 10K
Raptor drives work best in pairs. When
attached to the Dream Machine’s ICH6R
south bridge with Intel’s onboard RAID
controller running in RAID 0, these two
speed demons were so fast that running
benchmarks on them was like feeding
wood into a chipper.
In HD Tach 2.61, the Raptor tag-team
delivered a shocking average sequen-
tial transfer rate of 112MB per second.
Transfer rates topped out at a mind-bend-
ing 140MB/s on the Raptors’ outer plat-
ters, and burst speeds reached an aston-
ishing 293MB/s, meaning the Raptors
were this close (as you
read this, hold your
index finger and thumb
a few millimeters
apart) from com-
pletely saturating the
SATA 150 bus—an
impressive feat
indeed. Seek times hovered at around
8ms, which stomps all over the standard
12ms average seek time recorded by
7,200rpm drives and makes the system
“feel” incredibly fast too.
If you think a two-drive Raptor array
looks familiar, you’re right. We used one
in last year’s Dream Machine too. Truth be
told, we wanted to do something different
this year, but even though it’s almost two
years old now, the Raptor still rules the
roost, as no other manufacturer has ven-DREAM MACHINE 2004