Back to Page 1 Test System Setup AMD AM2 Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8 GHz dual core) ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce 590 chipset) 2GB (2x 1GB) of Corsair DDR2/800 6400C3 memory ATI Radeon X1900 XTX (Catalyst 6.4) Maxtor MaxLine III 250 GB SATA (16 MB buffer) hard drive Plextor PX-712S DVD drive Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi […]
by John Reynolds Introduction SimHQ’s recent look at AMD’s new AM2 socket saw the introduction of support for DDR2 memory for the company’s Athlon 64 AM2 lineup. Continuing the design of embedded memory controllers, AMD’s new family of dual-core processors work with DIMM speeds up to PC6400 (DDR2/800). Yet DDR2 has lagged considerably behind DDR in memory […]
Back to Page 3 What Sound Does Tortured Metal Make? Now, with all the gear in place in the chassis and a new Antec 24-pin power supply in place, it was time to really try to join the ranks of all the fingerless shop teachers of America. I brought in all of the mighty and destructive power […]
Back to Page 8 Attaching the Backing I used a piece of 1/4th-inch plywood for the backing and ordinary drywall screws to put it place. The screw heads would be out of sight and no one would see the difference. It was now time to stain it. There are two schools of thought for […]
Back to Page 7 My Little Helper I didn’t want to turn $70 worth of Southern Yellow Pine 1x10s into very stylish kindling. So, I enlisted the help of my father-in-law, who’d actually done some carpentry work. I started first with the base of the shelves. I took two 5-foot sections and bracketed them […]
Back to Page 6 I’ll Show You “CANNOT FIND BOOT SECTOR” It was bound to happen. At some point, you just snap. And it came while trying to complete the setup of my daughter’s machine. For some (and it’s a mystery to me) PC hardware knows exactly when you’re planning its demise when it won’t […]
Back to Page 5 Angle Grinder Drive Cage Angle Grinder The Replacement Arrives Jane’s F-15 and Jane’s USAF are fantastic games. They are also older than dirt and require an OS that Microsoft no longer acknowledges the existence of. Therefore, it was with a heavy heart that I eventually laid my legacy machine to rest. My ancient Hewlett-Packard […]
Back to Page 4 After cutting out the window, I then tried to use the grinder cylinder on my Dremel to smooth out the uneven spots. Don’t do that, either. It just makes them more uneven. Use a coarse and then a fine-grain file for the long sections and a rat-tail file for the corners. […]
Back to Page 1 Before In the Beginning… It’s a mess, isn’t it? And it isn’t even the first machine I’ve built. I haven’t purchased a store-bought rig since 1999. It was a half-decent rig, but for next-generation software, it was a decidedly last-generation computer. My Socket 478 3.0GHz Pentium 4, 1GB of PC2700 of […]
Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Angle Grinder by Chuck “PFunk” Bellows Introduction Gaming is an expensive hobby that can fill at least one corner of your house with clutter. Between wheels, joysticks, game CDs, manuals, replacement wheels for the first one you broke after trying to race Monza Junior in […]
Back to Page 5 In addition to the CPU tests, SimHQ also ran the synthetic suite’s memory tests to see how well the various test systems performed against one another. Each category is comprised of four tests that stress L1 and L2 cache and main memory performance. The following scores are the geometric mean […]
Back to Page 4 Synthetic Testing Windows Media Encoder 9 was used for SimHQ’s content creation test. The application is a free download from Microsoft and greatly benefits from systems capable of accelerating its multithreaded design. Falcon 4: Allied Force’s intro movie, a 91 MB AVI file, was converted into a WMV file with high […]
