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LinuxHardware.org 2001 System of the Year
h..p://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/07/169233&mode=thread
It appears that the beginning of a new year is upon us and we wouldn't be much of a hardware site without coming up with our own system of the year. What goes into a system designed ultimately for the most kick butt Linux performance possible? There are a lot of things we've learned this year that make some of these choices quite easy, while other developments led to us second guessing ourselves. We analyze the what and why of almost all major system components as we do our own hardware year in review and come up with the most awesome system we can build that will be our benchmark of all components in the year to come. Note that this computer is a single processor system. Our dual processor picks are coming soon.
Once you finish the article and are drooling for a system of your own, we offer it to you with the help of Pogo Linux. Be sure to read the conclusion for full details.
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Where to begin: The Case
When building the ultimate PC, a safe place to start is with the component that houses all other components: the case. A computer case has become a very personal item this year with "modding" taking off and the standard beige cases getting make-overs and becoming works-of-art. Also the big hit of the year was the influx of aluminum cases into the PC market, making the heavy steel cases of last year seem sub-standard. Why aluminum? As it was discussed in our first review which featured the Lian-Li PC-60 USB, it's lighter, conducts heat more efficiently, and just plain looks cooler than the standard steel case. So with this in mind we immediately turn to the only case review we did this year and choose Lian-Li as the manufacturer and say "take your pick" from their selection. Full-tower or mid-tower, a multitude of colors, and options such as windows and USB ports, Lian-Li offers a lot of choice in a case and make a very high quality part to boot. For a specific choice, we'll go with the Lian-Li PC-60 USB. This case is their standard part and is quite versatile, offering a good size case that's light and provides a good amount of expansion. The front mounted USB ports, all thumbscrew design, and easy-access slide out motherboard tray make this a truly awesome case.
Cost: $165.00
Power Supply
The nice thing about some of the new top-notch cases is that they no longer ship with power supplies. Why is that a good thing? Choice. For many years now, if you bought a case, it came with a power supply. Honestly a while back this wouldn't have mattered since power requirements weren't too steep and most system components were made by only a few companies making it relatively easy to figure out the maximum amount of power one would need. Today though, a computer can have such a wide range of components that the power requirements can fluctuate drastically. In the ultimate power supply we want plenty of juice as well as a clean, constant source of power. From the three reviews done this year, we see that PC Power & Cooling has flexed their muscle with an awesome unit: the Turbo-Cool 425 ATX. This power supply gives plenty of juice at 425 watts while holding the tightest regulation of any supply seen. It's a bit pricey but you get what you pay for in PC components.
Cost: $169.15
Processor
This year we have seen AMD leap ahead of Intel in pure processing power with AMD's move to the new Athlon XP and Intel's questionable release of the Pentium 4. The Pentium 4 was designed to pump more megahertz than anything in the industry but as we've seen, it's been at a huge cost. The instructions per clock (IPC) of the Athlon core trounces that of the Pentium 4 clock for clock and in 2001 Intel wasn't able to rev speeds high enough to keep up. Only in what can only be summed up as "multimedia" benchmarks does the Pentium 4 even show signs of life. While Intel's chip can scream at Quake 3 and audio encoding, on work-horse tasks such as compiling or decrypting, it falls more than a bit behind. For the 2001 system of the year, LinuxHardware.org chooses the fastest AMD Athlon XP available at year's end, the Athlon XP 1900+ running at 1.6GHz.
Cost: $250.00
Motherboard
Next we move to the component which all other components depend on, the motherboard. Since we have chosen our processor we know immediately that all Intel-based boards are ruled out. AMD boards are a diverse bunch with many available features and plenty of choices for chipsets. We can immediately rule out some boards as we know that the memory of choice is DDR. The past year has shown stiff competition in the DDR chipset market with the AMD 760 starting off the year as the chipset of choice. From there we saw the introduction of new chipsets from ALi, SiS, and VIA. Near year's end, the final contenders were released, the VIA KT266A and the NVIDIA nForce. Each generation has shown higher and higher performance levels with the peak being in the KT266A and nForce. We can rule out the nForce for a Linux system since NVIDIA has not yet shown even a glimmer of support or released documentation for volunteer development. The VIA KT266A, though, is an exceptional chipset as we found out in our look at two KT266A boards at the end of November. The top board reviewed by a substantial margin was the SOYO Dragon Plus! which is centered around the KT266A and features more extras than you can shake a stick at. This board is extremely fast, ultra stable, and includes such features as awesome on-board sound, on-board IDE RAID, on-board LAN, a sleek black PCB to name only a few.
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Cost: $150.00
Memory
As mentioned above, DDR is definitely our memory of choice for an Athlon XP system as 2001 was definitely the year of DDR SDRAM. AMD and partners showed substantial muscle over the competition from Intel and Rambus as knowledgeable consumers scoffed at the high-priced Rambus memory coupled with Pentium 4 processors and hungrily devoured the substantially cheaper DDR and AMD competitor. With the beginning of 2002 we will begin to say farewell to standard SDRAM all together as Intel drops it for Rambus and DDR and the SDRAM AMD chipsets begin to all but vanish from the market. There are many vendors from which to get our DDR memory but in the performance and Linux markets, a true leader stands out: Corsair. Corsair is name that most will recognize as high-quality name-brand memory. Corsair makes memory that goes through some of the roughest testing in the industry and is backed by a life-time warranty. Almost every Linux systems company that you can think of has used Corsair memory from Penguin Computing to VA Linux. For our system we wanted a good combination of performance with the possibility of overclocking (if you're into that) and quantity. For this we turned to the Corsair XMS2400 CAS2 sticks which are guaranteed to function at speeds up to PC2400. These come in at maximum 256MB sticks so we filled the Dragon's three open slots for a total of 768MB.
Cost: $345.00
Video Card
When talking high performance graphics in 2001 there were only two contenders, ATI and NVIDIA. While NVIDIA dominated 2001 with awesome product offerings from the initial release of the GeForce 3 to the release of their latest Ti series, ATI came up later in the year with their new Radeon series. Under Windows, the Radeon 8500 has been showing a lot of promise but under Linux the testing of ATI's new hopeful has yet to begin due to lack of drivers. NVIDIA on the other hand has kept their drivers up-to-date and with the latest releases has raised the performance bar by a considerable amount. Unfortunately NVIDIA still has not warmed up to the open source movement and probably won't anytime in the near future. We give kudos to ATI for their past open source support but their first Radeon offerings can't hold a candle to the GeForce 3-based cards. So with all that in mind, we turn to the NVIDIA GeForce 3-based cards for our system of the year. Which card to choose is quite a toss-up. All offer similar performance in a comparable price range. So what criteria did we go by? Well how about style and engineering prowess? Sounds good to us and with that being the criteria, we wanted a card that would look snazzy with the black PCB of our Dragon motherboard and consistently stood out as a power performer in its class. The ABIT Siluro GeForce 3 fits the profile perfectly with its black PCB and fancy silver heatsinks. Along with style, the Siluro GeForce 3 shows ABIT's engineering prowess by offering an ultra stable card at default speeds as well as speeds up to and in excess to those of offered by the top GeForce Ti500s.
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Cost: $300.00
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