W
hen we built our last round of
zero-point systems in April 2005,
using Athlon 64 FX-55 procs and
GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in SLI mode, we
thought these ultimate gaming rigs would
be too long a yardstick for measuring other
systems. Boy, were we wrong. Within six
months, review systems were racing past
our zero-point at warp speed. So while it
sounds crazy to upgrade from an Athlon 64
FX-55 system, we’re long overdue.
When sketching out the new system,
we faced the classic upgrader’s dilemma:
With AMD’s new DDR2 processors on the
way and Intel’s Conroe ready to come
ashore, anything we built now would be
outdated in weeks, not months. In the
end, we decided we just couldn’t wait any
longer. In another month, the review sys-
tems’ performance bars would be so much
longer than our zero-point system’s, we’d
have to run a centerfold just to accommo-
date their Holmesian length.THE CPU
In 2003 we made the switch from Intel to
AMD with some trepidation. It was, after all,
an untested platform and CPU. Sure it was
fast, but would it hold up over time? Now
almost three years later, we’re damn happy
with our decision. For our new test beds, we
double the computing power of our previous
2.6GHz FX-55 by moving to the dual-core
2.6GHz FX-60.THE VIDEOCARDS
There’s only one thing faster than a pair of
GeForce 7900 GTX cards running in SLI:
four GeForce 7900 GTX boards running in
quad SLI. Because we’re not building our
zero-point systems for ultra high-resolu-
tion gaming, however, the twosome is fast
enough. While ATI’s CrossFire cards are
attractive on some levels, we’re not com-
fortable going with the immature CrossFire
motherboard platform.THE MOTHERBOARD
Technically, we could have used our origi-
nal Asus A8N-SLI Socket 939 boards, but
we decided that having the nForce4 SLI
x16 chipset with a pair of true x16 PCI
Express slots was worth the trouble of
yanking out the old mobos. It was only nat-
ural that we’d upgrade to the Asus A8N32-
SLI boards. To reiterate what we said
above, we just aren’t ready to embrace
nascent ATI chipsets yet; our zero-point
not only has to be a reliable comparison for
review systems, but also a solid platform
for testing the majority of hardware and
software that comes into the Lab.THE POWER SUPPLY
A major graphics vendor recently told us
that the weakest link on the PC today is
the power supply. We have to agree. That’s
why we went with PC Power and Cooling’s
850W monster. These PSUs are certainly
not quiet, but we’ve never had a power
problem with the brand, and judging by
these beasts, we don’t ever expect to.THE MEMORY
Despite rumors of a DDR500 speed bump,
DDR400 ended up being the offi cial end
of DDR SDRAM. Fine by us. DDR2 perfor-
mance has been pretty ho-hum, thanks to
the spec’s higher latencies. We slapped in
2GB of Corsair’s DDR400 to replace our
Crucial DIMMs, which have been horribly
battered and bruised by editors who contin-ually yank out RAM before fully discharging
the system. This means you, Josh.THE HARD DRIVE
We debated whether to use a single
Western Digital 150GB Raptor drive or its
sibling, the slightly slower, but much larger
400GB WD 4000KD. Granted, the 4000KD
doesn’t sport SATA 3G, but that has no
impact on its performance.THE SOUNDCARD
What would our zero-point be without a
Sound Blaster? If you’re not convinced that
a good soundcard matters, you need only
play Battlefi eld 2 with Sound Blaster’s X-Fi
soundcard and a set of quality headphones
to be thoroughly persuaded. You’ll never be
satisfi ed with onboard audio again.THE VIDEOCARDS
There’s only one thing faster than a pair of62 MA XIMUMPC JUNE 2006
in the lab REAL-WORLD TESTING: RESULTS. ANALYSIS. RECOMMENDATIONS
AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-60 features two
2.6GHz cores in one CPU and is the fastest
proc on the market today.We Build Our New
Zero-Point Rigs
AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-60 featurAMD’s Athlon 64 FX-60 features two es twoTo keep review systems from lapping
our zero-point rig, we picked the fastest
videocard config you can get today: two
GeForce 7900 GTX cards in SLI mode.With SLI, the power supply is the weakest
link in a modern PC, so we chose a pow-
erful PSU for our test bed: PC Power and
Cooling’s Turbo-Cool 850.