Engineering the “Impossible” PC
 

System building used to be easy. A little over a decade ago, building your own system meant buying an ASUS, Abit, or Shuttle motherboard with FSB overclocking abilities, a 3dfx Voodoo Graphics (if you cared about gaming), and a Sound Blaster AWE64 (if you cared about sound). Things have gotten way more complicated now. Nowadays, system building enthusiasts have to think about memory latency, thermal and acoustic management, power supplies, and most recently, HDCP support on the video card.

A little over a year ago, we built the "Ultimate Workstation" with a pair of AMD Opteron 252 CPUs, 4GB of RAM, and a beefy 650W power supply. In January, we did a brief refresh article focusing on a "$400/component" system, highlighting Silverstone's flagship TJ-07 and the aluminum monobody construction. We thought these articles would stick around at least until 2007. Sure faster GPUs and CPUs would come out, but the principles behind component selection surely wouldn't change…

Oh, how wrong we were. The state of PC technology has changed so much in the last six months that it's time to write a new system building guide. Forget everything you've learned about system building – it's time to start with a fresh slate, and today we're going to take a look at just how far technology has improved in the last year.

let just say that not all choices made are the "best" or "best value for money" around...

I lol'd at the 9500.

those people shouldn't be allowed to use the word engineering


also, ceramique or MX-1 is the best choice for the noob user because it does not need reaplying like AS5 and 400 $ per memory module (puff puff, pass)

how frequent reapplying is necessary according to your for AS5?

I heard once a year if you want 100% performance (from several users) but it's not like the temperatures would rise so much that it is dangerous.


MX-1 for example, burns into a solid substance and then it performs a few degrees better than fresh and should last 8 years.

have AS5 and Ceramique running for more than 5 years in some PCs without any noticeable problems ;)