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

Ethernet - onboard dual 3COM on motherboard - “free”
Tyan's gone the full nine yards with the Thunder K7, which includes onboard Ethernet. However, this isn't your typical onboard Ethernet. Rather, Tyan has gone with dual 3COM 10/100 controllers, which is perfect for the high-end server market they are targetting. Of course, it will serve our purposes just fine as well.

Hard Drive - 4 x Seagate Cheetah X15 - 4 x $350 = $1400
Hard drive performance has always been one of the biggest bottlenecks in the speed of a computer.  After all, the only component whose speed is measured in milliseconds is the hard drive - everything else is nanoseconds or microseconds.  Even with the fastest drive on earth right now running at 15,000 RPM, the Seagate Cheetah X15 still has an access time of "only" 3.9 ms. Now 3.9 ms is phenomenal for a hard drive, but still an eon compared to SDRAM.

Because the X15 is a new model, the drive is only available in 18GB capacities for now. We're sure Seagate will bump up the capacity soon enough however. The Ultra 160 interface provides a maximum throughput of 160MB/s to keep things moving along smoothly.  We'll go with four of them to keep that RAID card purring along happily in RAID 0+1 mode for the best combination of performance and data integrity.

SCSI RAID Controller - Adaptec 3400S - $1100
When it comes to SCSI controllers, the first name that comes to mind is Adaptec, of course.  Since the last guide, they've released their 3400S Ultra 160 RAID controller, which is surprisingly similar to our previous pick, the DPT Smart RAID IV PM2865U3. The 3400S is a 4 channel controller with an 80 MIPS i960 processor onboard to handle the calculations required for RAID 5. This particular model includes a 32MB SDRAM cache that can be upgraded to 128MB. It's actually a 64-bit 33MHz PCI card, which is exactly what kind of slots we have on the Thunder K7.

CD/DVD-ROM - Pioneer DVD-305S or Plextor UltraPlex Wide - $125
This one is a matter of personal preference, but the top two options are the Pioneer 10X SCSI DVD-ROM, which is also capable of reading CD's at 40X max, and the Plextor Ultra Plex 40X max UW SCSI CD-ROM. Plextor drives are well known for their reliability and excellent performance, although Pioneer is certainly no slouch.  If you want DVD support, go with the Pioneer.  Otherwise, stick with the Plextor.

CD-RW - Yamaha CRW2100SZ 16x10x40 - $350
While we've gone with Plextor burners in the past thanks to their excellent reputation and features like Burn Proof, they've fallen behind more recently, allowing Yamaha to take the performance lead with their CRW2100SZ 16x10x40 CD-RW. Plextor does have an IDE version that is that fast, but nothing SCSI-based, and we'd like to keep this system all SCSI. Note that we passed on the 16X DVD from Pioneer for the same reason, although that is an option if raw DVD performance is critical to you. The same goes for Plextor's PlexWriter 16/10/40A burner, which is also IDE.

Operating System - Windows 2000 Professional - $200
This is another matter of preference, and is obviously affected by your particular application requirements.  However, since we've gone with an SMP system, we at least need an SMP capable OS, and that means Windows NT/2000, Linux, or BeOS. In the past, we went with a quadruple boot setup, but that's a relatively difficult task to accomplish, so we've decided to just keep things simple this time and stick to Windows 2000. If you feel like putting in the effort, you can boot multiple OSes if you need to, or even just for fun.

Bottom Line: $8,000 (without software or shipping)