Buyer's Guide: High-End Systems - June 2001

Dream System

Not having to worry about price is a luxury few people have, but it never hurts to dream up what you would buy in such a situation.  Or maybe you've just won the lottery.  Perhaps it's not even your own money involved thanks to a grant or simply an ungodly budget.  Whether dreaming or actually looking to buy, putting together the dream system can be a tricky, but fun, proposition. Below are our picks for such a system. 

CPU - Dual AMD Athlon MP 1.2GHz - $275 x 2 = $550
The CPU is probably the most critical, as well as the most controversial, component of any system.  The old AMD versus Intel battle wages on stronger than ever before with the Athlon and Pentium III/4.  It's a touchy subject among many die-hard fans of each processor type, a battle that has been won by Intel in our Dream Systems for quite sometime for one simple reason - SMP. That all chanaged recently with the release of the the 760MP chipset, AMD's first to support SMP. With its point to point EV6 CPU interface (as opposed to the shared interface Intel CPU's use), the Athlon MP in SMP is the fastest dual processor setup we've ever tested.

Currently, the Athlon MP is the only AMD CPU validated for SMP operation on the 760MP chipset, although our own tests have shown that stanard Socket-A Athlon's with the Thunderbird core, and even Duron's with the Spitfire core, work just fine in SMP. Nevertheless, we've gone with an Athlon MP for a couple of reasons, with themost important being the new Palomino core. This is the same core used in AMD's Athlon 4 for mobile platforms and results in lower heat production and slightly higher performance (typically 0-15%) that in many cases make it even faster than an Athlon 1.33GHz, the fastest Thunderbird that's readily available. For now, AMD is limiting the Athlon MP to 1.2GHz, although the core is clearly capable of running at higher speeds.

Those that are adventurous may choose to overclock the cool running Palomino core found on these CPU's, but we certainly don't recommend doing so on any mission critical machines. Besides, at this point, overclocking is not facilitated at all by the only 760MP motherboard currently available.

For more information, read our AMD Athlon MP Review.

Motherboard - Tyan Thunder K7 - $600
For now, going with a dual Athlon MP setup means that your motherboard choice is already made for you since the only 760MP board shipping now or even for the next 2-3 months is Tyan's Thunder K7. Fortunately, the board is an excellent one and includes just about everything you could ask for in a motherboard.

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At first glance, that $600 price tag is a bit pricey, but remember this is not bad at all in the high-end server/workstation market for which it is targetted. Part of the reason for the high price is the complexity of a board thanks to the dual EV6 buses and over a thousand pins on the 762 North Bridge. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Tyan has thrown in just about everything but the kitchen sink, including onboard Ultra160 SCSI, onboard dual 3COM Ethernet, 4 DIMM slots supporting up to 3.5GB of DDR SDRAM, onboard video, an AGP Pro slot, 64-bit PCI, and can even fit in a 1U case. The fact that this is a "cost is no object" system makes the decision very easy for us, but for most be people cost is a factor. Fortunately, there will be 760MP boards closer to $200 in price by the end of this year.

The one feature missing from the Thunder K7 is overclocking controls, which really isn't a surprise given the target market.

For more information, read our AMD 760MP Chipset Review.

Memory - 1GB Crucial Registered PC2100 DDR SDRAM (4 x 256MB) - $320
AMD's 760MP requires registered DDR DIMM's to operate properly. In the past, registered modules has come at a relatively large price premium compared to unbufferred modules, but the DDR revolution is apparently different. Crucial, one of the biggest suppliers of DDR memory right now is offerring 256MB registered modules for around $10 more than equivalent unbuffered. That's a 15% premium, but still quite small in absolute terms.

We've got 4 DIMM slots on our Thunder K7 motherboard, so let's fill them with the largest DDR DIMM's we can find - 256MB for a total of 1GB, sufficient for most users. All that memory comes at a modest total cost of $320, about a third the cost of an equivalent amount of RDRAM which helps to offset the high cost of the motherboard.