Building the Ultimate High-End Gaming Workstation: Stage I October 19, 2003 Alan Dang

Introduction

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There’s a method to my madness. Last year, I wrote about power supplies and in February, I wrote about building a high-end workstation with a focus on memory and graphics. While both of these articles are among our most popular, I received many questions about the relevance of workstation hardware article to a gaming audience. The answer is simple:

Anyone can build a gaming system by following a recipe and buying what everyone else is using. To be at the top-of-your-game at performance system building, you need to understand what you are doing and why. Almost no one has the budget to regularly buy exclusively flagship components but knowing how high-end workstations are designed will help you design a good gaming PC. You’ll be able to cut corners and redirect the money toward a graphics card or faster CPU depending on your goals. More importantly, if something goes wrong with your built system, you will have a good idea of where the weak-link in your system is, and what you need to upgrade.

“In the last episode…”

Last time, our goal was a scientific computing workhorse built on a very tight budget. I spent a lot of time talking about CPU and graphics card selection, but glossed over many of the other components. This time, we’re not going to leave any step of the process uncovered or any stone unturned. The other important change is that this time, the goal is to build a good workstation for me. Something that’ll let me get my work done during the week, while also letting me enjoy my games on the weekend.

As before, stability is paramount. However, as a personal system, having a practical PC was also critical. So let’s get started and see what I came up with!


SIDEBAR: Even light stands still

in awe of the nest built by

the sparrow in white

Dual Processor Gaming

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Dual CPUs systems were not originally intended for consumers. At a time when DOS or Windows 95 was what gamers needed, multiprocessor systems were only supported by Windows NT and Unix-like operating systems. Today things are different. The gaming OS of choice is Windows XP Professional, which also happens to support dual-CPUs natively.

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What’s in it for me?

A SMP-aware application is the best case scenario, but you still get an advantage to two CPUs with other applications. When you’re running a game, most of the CPU is spent processing the game data, however a small amount is used by Windows to manage your swap file, to check email in the background, to keep drivers and services running, etc. With a dual processor, Windows will intelligently distribute the workload between the CPUs. Your game will be able to take 100% advantage of the primary CPU while housekeeping applications can run on the second CPU. Another advantage would be multitasking –you can encode movies/audio, continue Folding @ Home, or batch process images while you play games. It’s probably not something you do all the time, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use your computer while you’re doing something computationally expensive?

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The predicament

Knowing that, which system would you prefer: a dual Opteron, or a single P4 or Athlon 64? Depends on the applications you run right? Well, this system is supposed to be good for games and digital imaging and scientific computing. What’s the right CPU for work and play?

If you were to look at the existing set of reviews on the Internet for your answer, you wouldn’t be able to come to a satisfactory conclusion. There are sites reviewing Opterons with only PC2100 memory, and “workstations” powered by on-board ATI Rage XL graphics chips. Some sites test dual processors with only single-threaded applications, and then complain that the appropriate benchmark would cost many thousands of dollars and be too difficult to work with. Most annoying is when reviewers run benchmarks and make conclusions without really understanding what’s going on.

That’s the second reason for writing this article: we’re going to address some of the gaps in dual CPU benchmarking. What we want to know is if an Opteron remains “fast enough” for games, but offers additional speed with SMP-capable digital photography applications.


SIDEBAR: Quake3 was the first game with SMP support.

Choosing the CPU

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Before I even thought about building anything, I came up with a benchmark suite designed to stress all components of a system, with a combination of real-world dual and single processor tests which we’ll go over later. At the moment I’m writing this paragraph, I have no clue which CPU platform is going to give the best overall performance on my test suite. That’s why we’re building these systems – to benchmark them. It’s unreasonable to write an article covering the build of multiple systems, so I’m going to focus on the Dual Opteron 246 system in this article. Common sense would expect this system to do very well given that it’s the most expensive, but more importantly, you’ll learn the most about system building in general by reading about the AMD64 build.

AMD Opteron

In our lab, we’re getting a 16 CPU Opteron 240 cluster running Scyld Beowulf Professional with bonded Gigabit Ethernet interconnects (with 8 nodes, exotic interconnects aren’t as important). The nodes are BOXX Technologies RenderBoxx R4’s. Our lab standardized on AMD64 given that our commercial LS-DYNA software is scheduled for AMD64 support, and our memory needs exceed 4GB.

This workstation will need to have excellent gaming performance, so I obtained the fastest Opteron CPUs I could – the Opteron 246.

The motherboard

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AMD Opteron

Since I needed an AGP slot in my dual Opteron motherboard, I was left with just a few options:
   1) Arima HDAMB
   2) MSI K8T Master2-FAR
   3) I-Will DK8W
   4) Tyan Thunder K8W

Arima is not a brand name most people recognize, but this “unknown” motherboard manufacturer is responsible for some of Intel’s reference motherboard designs. They only recently have begun to target the end-user. In the Opteron workstation market, Arima was first out with the AGP-enabled dual Opteron motherboard. Indeed desktop systems from BOXX made it to market well before Apple’s G5, making the very first gaming desktop with a 64-bit CPU an AMD64 system, not the Apple. Of course, the disadvantage to being the first is that the Arima HDAMB is also the least powerful.

The Arima offers no PCI-X slots, and thus the gigabit Ethernet adapter competes with other devices on the PCI bus. You can get away with this when there are not many PCI devices, but it’d still be a consideration. Having a PCI-X based GigE chip is important for extracting the maximum performance. The alternatives would be something like Intel’s CSA or NVIDIA’s nForce3 design. The other problem with the Arima is that there are only 4 DIMM slots available.

Four versus Eight DIMM Slots

Unlike other CPUs from AMD or Intel, the AMD Opteron features an on-die memory controller. This means that the memory is attached directly to the CPU. In the Arima HDAMB, the 4 DIMM slots are attached to the first CPU only. The alternative would be to assign 2 DIMM slots to each CPU but that would create another problem: if you ran a single-CPU, you’d only have two functional DIMM slots.

Anytime the second CPU needs to access memory, it requests the data through the first CPU. Thanks to Hypertransport, the performance hit is relatively minor but it would still be faster if the second CPU could directly access memory. In theory, you might expect the 8 DIMM slots (4+4) approach to be the perfect solution but it’s not quite that simple. It’s actually fairly complex, but one superficial approach is helpful. Imagine that you’re running a single-CPU only application that needs 1.5GB of RAM. You have 1GB on one CPU and another 1GB on the second CPU. In this case, it would have made more sense to attach the DIMMS to a single CPU. In other words, the type of applications you run can have an effect, but the “right more often than not” suggestion is to stick with symmetrical memory distribution.

In case any ultra-techies out there are wondering about SMP versus NUMA, the AMD Opteron takes care of this automagically. You get full NUMA support if you need it, but during BIOS startup, there is also one global addressing physical memory space that allows programmers to treat it seamlessly as SMP.

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Tyan vs IWILL

The Tyan and IWILL motherboards have 8 DIMM slots. Now, you can put 2 DIMMs with CPU 0 and 2 DIMMs with CPU 1. Each CPU can directly access its own bank of memory. The Tyan and IWILL boards are also more advanced, adding PCI-X and 4 port Serial-ATA.

Choosing between Tyan and IWILL was actually a very easy decision: driver support. The Tyan and ARIMA boards feature a Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet chip while IWILL went with a 3Com chip. With a 64-bit operating system, 64-bit drivers are also necessary; Broadcom’s AMD64 support is better developed than 3Com’s.

ARIMA offers a Promise Serial ATA chip while Tyan and IWILL chose to go with Silicon Image. Again, driver issues are key. The Promise chipsets, while very fast, suffer from poor Linux support and with AMD64 and scientific computing, being able to boot into Linux is key. The Sil3114 chip used by both boards connects to the PCI bus rather than PCI-X bus, limiting performance somewhat when all 4 drives are attached. We won’t see PCI-X Serial ATA until the Sil3124 is adopted.

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Analog Devices SoundMax Cadenza

The Tyan K8W is also the only motherboard in this group that features the Analog Devices SoundMax CODEC. For music, the SoundMax CODEC in the Tyan Thunder K8W provides excellent quality for a no-frills on-board audio. It’s noticeably better than the Realtek on-board devices.

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Dual Opteron Gaming Motherboards

Even though I’ve made a big deal about 8 DIMM slots in a high-performance workstation, if you’re just gaming, the 4 DIMM designs will probably still be a good idea. Most “ultra peformance” gaming systems still do fine with a 1GB of RAM, and 2GB is more than enough for desktop performance. Second, PCI-X makes less of a difference. We’re particularly eager to see the Tyan Tiger K8W and MSI K8T Master2-FAR reach the market. The Tiger K8W has the same Tyan reliability and careful component selection as its Thunder K8W sibling (though it uses an Intel GigE controller), but adds USB 2.0 support. The retail price is set to be half that of the Thunder K8W!

The MSI K8T Master2-FAR is also interesting as it is looking like it’ll be one of the cheapest dual Opteron solutions at just above $200. We don’t have one in-house yet, but it doesn’t look like it uses the same robust heatsink mounting mechanism as the Tyan. In addition, it only has 2 SATA ports instead of the 4 on the Tiger K8W. Both the Tiger K8W and K8T Master2-FAR support regular ATX12V power supplies along with EPS12V designs.

Lastly, we’ve all heard about the nForce3 dual boards… we’ll keep our eyes out for that.


SIDEBAR: ‘SBOS Installed’

Memory

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For these flagship systems, we needed the fastest memory we could get, and so we went with Corsair CMX512RE-3200LL for the Opteron and Corsair TwinX1024-3200PRO for the Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 machines. The “LL” modules from Corsair are ultra low latency memory modules with 2-3-2-6-T1 timings which is important due to the loss from registered RAM. In comparison, good unbuffered DDR CAS2 low latency ram will run 2-3-2-7 timing, and Registered ECC DDR3200 RAM from even high-performance companies such as OCZ can run as slow as 3-3-3-8. In real-world applications, it is latency that has the biggest effect on performance as opposed to simple bandwidth.


Last time I explained ECC memory, and this time I’ll explain what registered RAM does.

Registered ECC

The key is “address loading.” In an unbuffered (non-registered) architecture, the address signal from the memory controller is sent to every RAM chip on every DIMM module. As you increase the number of banks and increased the load on the memory controller, the signal from the memory controller deteriorates from the ideal square-wave to a sine-like wave where the signal rises and falls very slowly, lengthening the signal. This can cause timing errors because the chipset will try to read a data signal that is not yet completed. With a register, the memory chipset only addresses the register chip – one load rather than 16. On the next RAM clock cycle (half a system clock cycle since it is DDR), the register will send the signal to the RAM chips on the module. This ensures that the communication between the memory controller and RAM are timed precisely. The disadvantage is that there is a slight performance hit and only certain chipsets support/require registered ECC DDR-RAM.

Think of the register as the person at the front desk who’ll relay your message. If your voice is loud enough, it’s quick to yell to the entire factory. Otherwise, it’s better to pass your message to the front desk, who can then directly pass it on to the recipient.

The other way to think about it is that as you add more and more memory to a regular system, memory timing needs to slow down. With registered DIMMS, you just have this face a fixed register latency, but can then run 2-3-2. In other words, if you ran a system with only a little bit of memory registering can slow you down. If you an a sytem with more banks of memory, not only is registered DDR more stable, but it's faster.

For this server-grade reliability, the Athlon 64-FX and Opteron are designed for registered ECC DDR-RAM, just as non-i875P Xeon chipsets are. While all registered DDR memory is ECC (due to marketing/practical issues), all ECC memory is not registered.

The Corsair Legend

Most reviews of Corsair memory love to talk about Corsair’s “Legendary Performance.” Those in the know, think of Corsair’s “Legendary Reliability.” Corsair’s philosophy to making high performance memory comes from careful selection from memory suppliers and in precise trace lengths and highly controlled board design. By making their memory reliable, they also make the memory run faster. That’s why Corsair has had so much success in the gaming industry and in the server industry. With Corsair, you never have to decide between reliability or performance – you get both.

SIDEBAR: Corsairs or privateers were pirate ships with a commission or a letter of marque from a government or king authorizing the capture of merchant ships belonging to an enemy nation.

Graphics

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An ultimate gaming workstation wouldn’t be complete without a powerful graphics card. If we were running digital content creation or CAD applications on our workstation, the no-brainer answer would be a high-end NVIDIA QuadroFX GPU. Quadro FX boards are rock-solid in stability and compatibility, offer exceptional image quality, and have performance that at times is a full generation ahead of ATI’s FireGL. In addition, most popular professional content creation applications are optimized for Cg, NVIDIA’s high-level shader language allowing full advantage of its dynamic branching shader architecture and 128-bit floating-point precision.

In this system, our workstation applications are CPU intensive rather than GPU intensive and so the Quadro isn’t the best product for us. Our decision will have to be GeForce versus Radeon.

$1B question: GeForce versus Radeon

No one can argue against the fact that the ATI Radeon 9800 platform offers excellent DX9 performance. With many DX9 games mirroring ATI’s hardware design, the Radeon 9800 has been handling games like Half Life 2 with little effort. On the other hand, NVIDIA NV3x products were designed as “cinematic computing GPUs,” and seem to focus on non-realtime hardware accelerated rendering features such as 128-bit floating point color and 12-bit sub-pixel accuracy on even their ultra budget GeForce FX 5200 card. Support for dynamic branching in shaders, or developer-selectable FP16/FP32 pixel formats is important in the grand scheme of things, but ends up using valuable transistors that may otherwise have been used for other performance boosting logic. To the end user this means they’ve had to wait for NVIDIA to come out with Detonator 50 series drivers with the new scheduler.

There would be no controversy if I went with ATI in this “ultimate system.” The R9800 is a popular choice at most websites and I would even save time by not having to write anything detailed in this section of the article either. On the other hand, if I simply picked ATI without actually testing NVIDIA also (or picked NVIDIA without testing ATI), that’d be akin to selling out, which I won’t do.

2D Performance Differences

While waiting for Brandon to send me the Radeon 9800 Pro and GeForce FX 5900 Ultra for test, I used a QuadroFX 2000 because I needed a running system. You see, when I evaluate components for stability, I don’t use a dedicated test bed or specialized suite – I force the component to work in a production system. Obviously I do a clean install of WinXP, etc. but the “test system” and my “primary system” for day-to-day work becomes one and the same. I install Windows, move my email and documents over, set up my ICQ and other critical applications and unplug my previous PC. This lets me pick up nuances of performance or compatibility that might otherwise be missed.

When I moved to the Radeon 9800 Pro (with clean VGA drivers), I immediately noticed something was off. My system seemed slower – like it was a little bit laggy. I felt as if my hard drive was slightly fragmented or that my Internet connection was just a hair congested. Quick checks showed that it wasn’t so.

Now, I wrote the article on 2D performance 2 years ago to disprove that 2D performance was “fast enough.” But even then I was convinced that in 2003 all cards were fast enough… it was time to run the numbers and yet again, I discovered that 2D performance continues to be overlooked.


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Drivers

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The Driver Quality Gap

Part of the superior 2D performance you see above is due to hardware, but driver overhead also plays a big role. That has always been a historical challenge for the driver engineers.

Now, some of you are about to flame me for not considering that ATI has made significant gains with their CATALYST drivers or noting that NVIDIA’s beta Detonator drivers have bugs that cause visual glitches and ignore the 2D performance issues. Indeed, some sites may say that I’m like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand if I think ATI drivers are still plagued with driver issues.

These systems will spend half their time in Linux, and NVIDIA's drivers for Linux can be considered mature. ATI’s recent Catalyst 3.8 drivers should make a big improvement in Linux, but we will need some time to evaluate it.

Linux aside, in Windows, one major strength of NVIDIA’s driver set is the Matrox-like 2D feature set. In terms of dual monitor support, NVIDIA supports stretched XP desktops, HW accelerated OpenGL over spanned monitors, and per-application preferences - things that aren’t supported with ATI Hydravision. Some of the “It was useless until I needed it” features include NVRotate. This driver-level rotation works seamlessly with all applications and preserves video acceleration. ATI once tried to code rotation support into their graphics card but it hasn’t made its way back into current drivers. For anyone with a portrait mode display, NVRotate can be a Godsend as it works perfectly with a minimal performance hit.

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Storage

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Last time, my budget prevented me from getting anything other than a standard Western Digital IDE 7200 rpm hard drive. Since I knew that was the weakest link, I added a high-performance drive cooler. The system is still running great.

For the current dual Opteron system, I initially went with an 80 GB Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9, the 7200 RPM FDB motor. The Maxtor is a high performance 7200 RPM drive that’s quiet and fast. What I am waiting for is the new Western Digital 73 GB Raptor 10,000 rpm S-ATA drive with FDB motors. The 36.7GB Raptor is currently the fastest desktop drive on the market, outperforming even 15K drives in desktop applications according to our colleagues at StorageReview. The 73GB version will be even faster, and should be very quiet with its FDB motor. My plan to go with the Raptor is for reliability. As a flagship model built for enterprise grade performance, the Raptor features a full 5 year warranty and MTBF ratings of 1.2 million!

The rationale for starting with the Maxtor first is pretty easy. Maxtor’s MaxBlast 3.0 is available as a downloadable CD-ROM ISO. One of the features included is a partition-to-partition copy which will work even with your primary OS. It’s like Norton Ghost with the exception that it is free to use as long as you have one Maxtor drive in your system, and in our experience, the Maxtor MaxBlast 3.0 is actually more reliable than many of the 3rd party applications out there.

Some of you may be sending off that email to me saying that I was a fool not to choose SCSI for its proven reliability. The thing with hard drives is that they’re a KNOWN weak link. You can spend plenty of money on a multi-drive software RAID mirroring setup (to give the extra protection of having each drive connected to a separate controller chip) and still have something go wrong where both drives fail simultaneously. It’s not a theoretical possibility – it has happened. Likewise there are Cheetah 15k SCSI drives with 1.5M hours MTBF that still die after a year of light use. It’s rare, but it happens.

There’s no alternative to good backups. Take the time to backup your documents and email. You will never regret it. The Raptor is a good balance between spending money on reliability, performance, and capacity.

Optorite DD0203 DVD+/-RW Combo Drive

What? No Plextor 8x drive? Why didn’t I go with the bigger brand names of Pioneer, Sony, or TDK? The Optorite DD0203 is a fast low-cost DVD+/-RW Combo Drive featuring Burn-Proof, HD-Burn (>1GB on a CD-R, readable only in HD-BURN compliant drives), and a large 8MB buffer. While the Plextor is faster with CD-R’s and DVD-R’s, we did not feel that it was the wisest use of funds.

Speaking of power…

You know the power supply is important and if there was one thing you should always “overspend” on when building a system, it’s the power supply. In the last article, I went with a PC Power & Cooling power supply, one of the best power supplies in the industry. This time I went with the SuperMicro SP450-RP. The SuperMicro has a redundant fail-safe fan – if the main PSU fan fails, a second fan will engage. The rated power is 12V = 30A. 5V = 26A. and 3V = 30A.


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Power

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If you recall from my Console Picture Guide, I was able to show what the difference between Monster Cable and regular cable did for the Playstation 2. Trying to document the benefits from a line conditioner is much tougher. Here’s what we tested:


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Power (cont’d)

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At this moment, I appeared to have
  1) A dose-response relationship to line noise
    a. When line noise was high, the system was unstable.
    b. When line noise was minimal, the system was stable.
  2) Measurable reductions in line noise with line conditioners.
  3) Spontaneous resolution of the AC line noise from the wall

So the question is why the change in line noise from the wall? Well AC line noise can be caused by anything that is plugged into the grid, and EMI noise has effects over distance because all cables act as antennas. In my apartment, that means something my neighbor has can affect the quality of my own power. EMI noise can be caused by motors such as refrigerators.

At this point, I contacted Monster Cable to ask them if they could send me the “AC line noise generator” they used at hi-fi shops to demo their equipment. I wanted to see if I could generate system crashes with it. You know what they sent?


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Resolving the power issues

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All we really need to do to get the formal proof is to cause a system to crash by adding noise to the circuitry. So far, I haven’t be able to find the same combination of components to do that – whatever was causing the high levels of AC noise at the beginning of the ordeal was no longer plugged-in. Maybe it was something my neighbor had plugged in?

Nonetheless, based upon these results, I feel confident saying that AC line noise can cause system crashes and that line conditioners can reduce the amount of line noise to a clinically relevant amount that will bring back stability. Is it rare? Probably, but it does happen. It’s like insurance, only you never see it being used. The other problem is that you’re not going to appreciate the protection that the PC line conditioner gives you. Here’s why:

With perfect power (both line conditioner and power supply), your system is never going to crash from dirty power, so you’ll never have an opportunity where you’ll think to yourself “whew, the line conditioner saved me there.” You will be oblivious to the fact that your AC power is noisy. At the same time, with perfect power, when your system does crash, it’ll be from a cause other than dirty power so you’ll think to yourself “this line conditioner was useless.” It’s a thankless job.

However, after losing 300GB of data to dirty power, the less-than-a-dollar-a-day cost of a high-end line conditioner seems trivial, especially given that a line conditioner will not go obsolete. There aren’t many products that have the same never-obsolete status. The alternative is living on the edge and spending several thousand on HW data recovery. Line noise has killed data – it could happen to you too.

So, my current recommendation is to get the best line conditioner you can afford and never thank me for doing so. In our experience, the PC900 won’t be sufficient in a noise-stressed system such as ours and something of PC1000 performance will be needed. We’ll be working on testing other line conditioners once we figure out how to come up with a test bed for “clinically relevant” AC line noise so we can tell you exactly how much money you need to spend.

What about improved picture/sound quality?

Power conditioners also claim to improve picture and sound quality. We’ll be looking at these claims in a future article. Based upon our initial impressions, you’ll be buying a line conditioner for your PC for stability reasons not performance. That said, with our regular cable TV that’s being viewed on a HDTV, we’re noticing an improvement in the image that’s still small, but more significant than high-end cable differences.

SIDEBAR: Some high-end Uninterruptible Power Supplies or enterprise-grade surge protectors also have line conditioners.

The case

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The secret to cooling is airflow, and the secret to a quiet PC is laminar flow. Thus, when choosing a chassis, you will ideally want to find one with large exhaust fans at least 80mm in size, but preferably 92 or 120mm. Chassis selection was actually one of the most time intensive portions of this project. We explored many options including products from Enermax, Chenbro, Yeong Yang (Gigacase), Soldam, Lian-Li, Coolermaster, and even Intel!

AMD System

We finally settled on the SuperMicro 742i-450 Server Chassis in the Opteron for its blend of good looks and design.


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Audio

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Throughout this entire process, we’ve spent the extra cash to get quiet(er) computing without compromising performance or stability. Now it’s time to cash-in with the killer audio system. We went with unconventional devices: the M-Audio Audiophile USB and Swans T200a.

Since I only have room to setup a stereo audio setup as opposed to multi-channel, I went with the external M-Audio Audiophile USB. By moving all of the audio components to a line-conditioned AC source rather than bus powered circuitry, the M-Audio Audiophile USB is able to provide exceptionally clean audio, free from the EMI-rich environment of the system chassis and inherent noise of the switching power supply.

But I thought USB sound cards sucked?

Most of the time, USB speakers and USB sound cards are associated with low-end rather than high-end products. This is not because the reduction of interference is false, but because most USB speakers and sound cards end skimp on the DACs or OP-AMPs. By going to an external prosumer grade USB (or even Firewire) audio card, you do get the best audio reproduction performance possible. The Revolution 7.1 or M-Audio Sonica Theater would also have been good choices for high quality stereo audio, however the DACs used in the Audiophile USB are even better. The limited bandwidth of USB 1.1 is still adequate for high-quality 2 channel audio however it is true that system performance is lost by going with this product. With USB 1.0, you are only allowed half-duplex 24/96 or full-duplex 16/48 audio.

When looking for a pure audio fidelity in a sound card, you’ll need to get a sound card that does not resample 44.1 kHz audio to 48 kHz audio. This significantly limits the options you have – it turns out that none of the Audigy 2 products can pass an unaltered 44.1 kHz signal and to date, 44.1 kHz native-sampling sound cards do not have exceptional DirectSound acceleration.


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Why you probably won’t pick out the Audiophile USB

The Audiophile USB isn’t a sound card in the traditional sense – it operates much more like a component audio device. There is no software mixer. If you don’t understand what this means, you don’t want the Audiophile USB. That is, there is no way to control the volume from any piece of software. The hardware volume knob is the only output. Essentially, at maximum volume, the M-Audio Audiophile USB is providing the true line-level output and you attenuate the signal using the knob. The line-in is not amplified and provides no gain. In other words, when you do a loop back from the maximum output of the Audiophile USB to the input of the Audiophile USB, you’re recording at a +0 dB.






SIDEBAR: A good 2-speaker setup can create a more believable environment than a cheap 4-speaker setup.

Speakers

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If there is one thing that has set FiringSquad apart from our colleagues, it is our multimedia expertise. We were one of the first websites in the gaming community to bring attention to the still venerable Klipsch Promedia v2.400 speakers and to our knowledge, the first and only website to document the differences between high-end and generic cables for videogame consoles. For this ultimate gaming system, we searched everywhere for the multimedia speakers with the best bang for the buck possible and settled with the Swans T200a.

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Sound Performance

These speakers are so exciting that Alexis is working on a dedicated review of these speakers (along with the Swans M200). As nice as these speakers look, they sound even better. These speakers will draw attention for their sound quality. There is an uncanny transparency with these speakers offering life-like midrange purity, and detail – all while providing a musical neutrality that is never fatiguing. The speakers are just slightly bright (in a good way – it’s not harsh), imparting a flavor along the lines of Dynaudio Audience speakers or the Sennheiser HD590 headphones. We have never reviewed better loudspeakers at FiringSquad.

Think back to when the Klipsch Promedia’s first came out. That’s the sort of experience I’m getting with these Swans T200a speakers, except now it is the T200a’s bringing audiophile grade speakers to the PC. We still love and recommend the Klipsch and Logitech line-up for games, but anyone ready to move onto something more luxurious and true-to-the-music performance, the 2-channel Swans are your next bet. Of course, keep in mind that the better your speakers, the better your source needs to be. This is not because the speakers do any worse with low-quailty recordings, but because high-quality recordings will sound that much better on T200a.

So why did you need the Audiophile USB?

When it comes to connectivity, the T200a’s roots as a professional studio monitor show. The rear offers two inputs (balanced XLR, and standard vanilla unbalanced RCA) and a volume knob. There are no bass or treble knobs to be found here.

In a real studio, the speaker equipment is kept at a fixed volume. When you record a 100 dB signal at your mixing console and set the master volume to +0 dB, you want to hear the results as 100.0 dB. You’d want to set it once and never touch it again. Consequently, the T200A studio monitors are not designed to have their volume regularly changed. This is evident from the fact that a) the speaker knob is located on the back, and b) each speaker has its own volume knob (just as studio amplifiers have separate volume knobs for each channel).

If you were to run this on your desktop PC, you’d want to have a way to change the volume easily without having to reach behind both of your speakers. You can get a separate pre-amp if you really wanted to, or you could use the built-in pre-amp on your sound card. In the case of the Audiophile USB, there is a master hardware volume knob to make things easy.

You would also do just fine with the software Windows volume control, after all that’s how headphones work. In this system though, we’ll also be adding a Griffen PowerMate. What is a Griffen PowerMate? Well, read on to find out…


SIDEBAR: Microfiber cloths are great for wiping dust off your PC.

Input devices

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Griffin PowerMate

The Griffin PowerMate is a bit of a silly luxury from one perspective. It’s an $40 incredibly well-built USB aluminum knob that acts like a super scroll wheel. It can be used to scroll through webpages, or act as a shuttle for video editing, or more commonly a dedicated volume knob. The drivers are highly flexible and allow you to assign 5 commands to the device, a button press, left or right rotation or a combination of pressing down and rotating. The commands can be non-macro keypresses (so ALT-TAB, or CTRL-SHIFT-0 is ok, but ALT-F-then-X isn’t possible).

There is a pulsing blue LED light at the base of the unit. This can also be left on all the time. For Windows, this LED indicator can dim/brighten depending on your volume - on a Mac, you could program the pulse as as an indicator of incoming email or the level of CPU utilization, etc.

As mentioned earlier, this would be a perfect product if you need a volume knob for headphones or if for some reason your speaker’s volume knob on your speakers is not readily accessible. Of course, you can pick up the PowerMate if you simply prefer the look. The feel of the knob is smooth and the mechanism feels solid.

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Goldtouch Ergonomic USB Keyboard

‘Almost perfect’ is how I described the Goldtouch Ergonomic Keyboard in my review at GadgetSquad.com. Offering adjustable split and tilt, the Goldtouch keyboard is the first ergonomic keyboard that was able to improve my comfort while also maintaining full typing efficiency. After using the keyboard for a longer time, I’d have to say that a wireless model would also be something great to add to the unit. I’ve come to like the relocation of page up/page down keys and really, it’s just the malpositioning of the left ALT key that prevents me from calling this the perfect keyboard.

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Logitech MX700

We think of Microsoft as the big giant of technology, but it is in fact Logitech who sells the most mice. The MX700 is an excellent mouse as it’s comfortable, and has just the right number of buttons and just the perfect mass. With the high-sampling rate of a corded mouse, and an effective recharging station, it’s the most impressive mouse we’ve used since the original MouseMan+.

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More goodies

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Matrix Orbital MX232 and 233 LCD panels

In the early days of case modding, simply painting your case a different color from black or beige was already considered amazing. The truly exotic cases however would have serial controlled LCD displays. In the past, however, adding an LCD screen required deft control of your power tools and programming knowledge to display text on the screen. Often, these LCDs would programmed to display static text such as the system name or system specs.

Things have changed and today, installing a drive bay LCD is as easy as installing an optical drive. Moreover, today’s drive bay LCDs can be optimized for both home-user (gaming) and enterprise computing thanks to today’s LCD driver software.

For these flagship systems, we went with the Matrix Orbital MX2 LCD panels. While LCDs themselves have been around the block, the Matrix Orbital devices are the most feature-rich of the LCD drive bay systems.


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LCD panel (cont’d)

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The magic of the Matrix Orbital LCD panels is in LCDC, the high-performance LCD driver. Essentially a 2nd-party application, LCDC is developed by an independent developer for the exclusive use with Matrix Orbital displays. Imagine Polyphony Digital (Gran Turismo) when they were still independent, and exclusively working for PlayStation. LCDC allows you to quickly and easily configure your Matrix Orbital MX2 while also giving you incredible room to customize the setup. If you bought bulk Matrix Orbital LCDs (say larger 4 line versions, or high-intensity vacuum fluorescent displays) you would need to spend $18 on LCDC. With the MX2 a full-registered version of LCDC is bundled.

Out of the box, you can easily configure your LCD panel to display information from Motherboard Monitor 5, ASE Game Server (All Seeing Eye – stats for all sorts of gaming servers), Usage monitor (uptime, CPU utilization), FRAPS, stock quotes, real-time news, Winamp 2 and 3 visualizations and even more. What makes LCDC so impressive is that you can check the box for Winamp 2 support and be done with it … or you can tweak exactly what is being displayed; if you wanted to keep track of your system temperature permanently, you can have the first row provide system information and the second row display the Winamp spectrum analyzer or track info.

The “ScreenBuilder” feature of LCDC is where everything gets done.

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LCD looks

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Style

Not only is LCDC very effective at providing the information you want, but it also does it with style. These are character LCDs, but LCDC does a great job of creating ascii-style art to make things look great. Some LCD screens will just say something like 1GB / 2GB system memory used. With the MX2, it’ll do that while also having a cool bar graph at the bottom. For the network uplink/downlink, the arrows are animated. It’s little things like this that really make the MX2 a line above the rest. If you’re as old-school as me, you might remember ACiD ANSI art packs…


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Air	Page:: ( 19 / 20 )

There is one last component which I am not going to address in detail, but should be something you keep in the back of your mind -- the environment. We’ve talked about clean power, good airflow, and proper shielding, but air quality can have a significant effect on your system stability. Anyone who’s seen the inside of a computer knows how much dust can build in your case. Dust can increase your system temperature as it insulates the case (think attic fiberglass insulation) and will also slow down your fans and occlude air intake/exhausts. In a low-noise system such as the ones we’re building, dust will make a relatively significant contribution. We won’t even touch upon the rare doomsday scenario of dust and electrostatic discharge risk.

Without question, all things considered, air purification is a minor detail in the grand scheme of things. We’re not going to say that an air filter is a critical system component, but this is something you should still think about. A system is more than the sum of the components – make sure you’ve made appropriate system decisions in everything you do. An air purifier that improves your comfort can also improve system stability.

We’re not going to review air purifiers at FiringSquad or discuss the difference between HEPA, high-flow HEPA-like, electrostatic, or plasma designs to air purification. I will say that I’ve seen BlueAir purifiers in a neonatal ICU though.

What I want you to do the next time you build a system, or even with your current system is to take 5 seconds to think about the environment your PC is in. You’ve probably already done this subconsciously, but really think about it for a second. Is the PC on the floor, where it can pick up more dust? If so, raise the PC off the floor. If the PC is on your desk, would putting the system to the left or right of your monitor change the amount of dust exposure?

You’ll see high-end companies selling $10,000 PC systems with solid-state hard drives, but if I was building a system for someone who had that kind of money, I’d definitely set them up with a high-end air purifier. It’s that attention to detail that only die-hard enthusiasts like us would think of. It’s too bad no one would be able to afford FiringSquad custom designed systems. ;)


SIDEBAR: When buying an air purifier, the replacement filter costs should be included in your budget.

Putting it all together

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Final Thoughts

Opteron 246 –TBD
You’ll have to wait for Part 2 of our article for the CPU benchmarks and scores

Zalman CNPS7000-AlCu – 88%
While the stock coolers from both AMD and Intel are sufficient for a stable system running a retail CPU, if you are going with an OEM CPU, the cooling performance and silent performance of the Zalman 7000 heatsink is well worth the cost. These are probably the best heatsinks you can buy in their weight class.

Tyan Thunder K8W – 92% Bull’s Eye

For a gaming dual Opteron board, you’re better off waiting for the consumer-grade boards such as the Tyan Tiger K8W or MSI K8TMaster. For high-performance systems requiring PCI-X, 8 DIMM slots, GigE, and Serial ATA the Tyan Thunder K8W is clearly the platform of choice. This is currently the pinnacle of dual Opteron boards – it’s just up to you to figure out if you’re happy just reaching base camp. With USB 2.0 or at a lower cost, the K8W would have gotten Editor’s Choice.

Corsair DDR400 Low-Latency Registered ECC – 92% Bull’s Eye

The amazing numbers we are producing with this system are due in no small part to the 2-3-2-6 timing of the Corsair DDR400 Registered ECC RAM. When it comes to reliability, I don’t think you can buy anything better.

Monster Power Conditioning – Editor’s Choice
It's hard to give the Monster Power Conditioning a score, even though we've given the technology Editor's Choice. Clearly, something capable of providing measurable system stability is important. In these cases, the $150 PC1000 would easily earn a 92% at FiringSquad. That said, I live in San Francisco which has an older power grid that has been spliced many times. If you were looking for noisy AC, this is the city to be in. On the other hand, if your AC line is clean, it's not going to add much benefit to your system. As a preventive measure, the Monster Power PC1000 would score around 87%. We also need to develop better testing metholodology. We know that the PC900 was ineffective at providing system stability in our harsh environments, but it may be sufficient elsewhere. Likewise, we still need to do some more tests on the higher end HTS3600.

All that said, if you think power could be affecting your system performance, we recommend getting the Monster Power line conditioner from a retailer with a fair return policy and try it out.

SuperMicro 742i-450 Chassis – 87%
Pricey, but it is truly an enterprise-grade design. It’s a step above even Coolermaster cases.

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