Absolute fastest possible machine combo

no its not the Intel P4.
i guess it would be the AMD Athlon-C 1.4GHz, o/ced to ~1.6GHz on a AMD760 board (or maybe ALi Magik chipst in its latest rev B0) with 512 MB DDR-SDRAM, IDE-RAID 0 with two Ultra ATA/100 disks and the latest GeForce3 display card with 64MB DDR-RAM.

girish

<font color=blue>die-hard fans don't have heat-sinks!</font color=blue>

The fastest combo of PC parts would be the MSI K7 Master-S, an 1.4GHZ Athlon at around 2GHZ with extreme cooling (1.7-1.8GHz with a Swiftech cooler), the fastest SCSI drive available (or a SCSI RAID settep would be faster), and some PC2400. You would have to set the multiplier/bus to around 12.5x150 to get the best performance.
For non overclocking, the 1.4 is the fastest, and you can get by with PC2100 set at Cas2.
You will want to use the largest DDR modules available, as the MSI board has only 2 sockets.

You could also consider a dual settup for much more money.

You could also build a Pentium 1 supercluster from junk systems that would probably be faster (use maybe 20 Pentium 233's, you can get those cheap). The nice thing about superclusters are they are scalable, I'm trying to do something right now, but am not at liberty to discuss the details.

Cast not thine pearls before the swine

Go for dual Athlon-MP's, the fastest you can get, lots of DDR (PC2100 min.), it's dirty cheap so buy loads of the stuff, then stick as many of the highest RPM HDD's as you can afford into a RAID array. GFX card doesn't really matter, maybe a Maxtor G450 for nice high res. 2D. (And the best real time talking heads on the market! lol)

I AM Canadian.

so you will need a faster disk subsystem as well as faster memory subsystem.

a Athlon-C 1.4 GHz (overclocked to its maximum preferably by overclocking its FSB to get faster memory subsystem - something like 150 x 11.5 = 1650 or similar values) with good cooling, on a board like AMD 760 or ALi Magik rev B0 (its supposed to improve on memory performance) like the Asus A7M266 or A7A266.

512 MB CAS2 DDR-SDRAM, a decent SCSI RAID card implementing at least stripping with two High speed Ultra160 (Ultra320 is coming) SCSI disks, those 10k rpm ones, even better would be RAID 5 with more than 3 disks.

as for display dont spend too much, a GeForceMX with 32 MB SGRAM would be more than enough.

A Dual Athlon system would really be overkill considering its cost v/s performance, since large file manipulations need faster disk I/O plus faster memory.

even a P4 1.7 GHz with similar configurations (more RDRAM)but on Asus P4T should be great at that, just costlier. I would suggest wait for Northwood, i850 will stay for a while to support Northwood (if you intend to stick with RDRAM for P4), else Brookdale will provide DDR support as well.

girish


<font color=blue>die-hard fans don't have heat-sinks!</font color=blue>

Go with AMD to save money and use that saved money on a SCSI RAID config with really fast HDDs (Cheetah x15)