Engineering the Impossible PC November 06, 2006

Introduction

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A little over a year ago, we built the "Ultimate Workstation" with a pair of AMD Opteron 252 CPUs, 4GB of RAM, and a beefy 650W power supply. In January, we did a brief refresh article focusing on a "$400/component" system, highlighting Silverstone's flagship TJ-07 and the aluminum monobody construction. We thought these articles would stick around at least until 2007. Sure faster GPUs and CPUs would come out, but the principles behind component selection surely wouldn't change…

Oh, how wrong we were. The state of PC technology has changed so much in the last six months that it's time to write a new system building guide. Forget everything you've learned about system building – it's time to start with a fresh slate, and today we're going to take a look at just how far technology has improved in the last year.

As always, our philosophy behind these "system building" articles has always been to provide a framework and approach to component selection. Don't think of these as a recipe for a system. Instead, focus on our approach to component selection.

The CPU

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For our ninth system building article, we're going with the Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe).

The motherboard

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For our motherboard chipset, we'll be going with the Intel 965. This decision locks us out from running a full-speed ATI Crossfire, but the P965’s new memory controller should be an interesting proposition. While 975X platforms continue to offer excellent performance, the 965 runs a close race. The other reason I’m going with P965 is that my plan is to go micro-ATX on this machine...

System Cooling

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Given that our motherboard is passively cooled, we'd also like to keep the rest of our system as quiet as possible. For years, we've stuck with the Zalman CNPS-7000-AlCu and the B-revision successor. We've also found the Silverstone Nitrogon NT02 to be an excellent choice for tight spaces, low-noise performance, and easier cleaning. This time, we'll be going with an 18 dB Zalman CNPS-9500AT copper cooler.

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Thermal Paste

In the last few months, there has been renewed interest in thermal interface material. With today's high-performance aftermarket heatsinks, most people are putting on too much thermal grease; a translucent haze of Arctic Silver 5 is sufficient.

To address the problem of thermal paste being too thick, two new thermal grease materials have been introduced, offering superior ease of installation: Cooler Master's NanoFusion and Zalman's ZM-STG1. NanoFusion is a premium thermal grease that offers superior performance to Arctic Silver Ceramique. Since it's less dense than Arctic Silver 5, it's easier to spread over the CPU core. Zalman's ZM-STG1 is liquid thermal interface that is brushed onto the surface of the CPU and the heatsink. This is probably the easiest premium thermal interface to apply. Even though the STG1 doesn't offer the same raw cooling performance as NanoFusion or Arctic Silver 5, real-world performance is very positive since it's so easy to apply an appropriately thin layer.

Both of these compounds are good alternatives to Arctic Silver 5, however a properly applied layer of Arctic Silver 5 offers similar performance to NanoFusion and ZM-STG1 when using standard air-cooled heatsinks. First-time system builders may want to consider NanoFusion or ZM-STG1 though.

We'll also need more time to determine how NanoFusion and ZM-STG1 hold up over time. One of the concerns about Zalman’s thermal paste is that it has a high alcohol content. There is some concern that the STG1 has excellent initial qualities, but may need re-application at a later date or see poorer results over time. We’ll be keeping track of our temperatures both after initial application and then 30 days later, and then swap it out for Arctic Silver 5 and repeat the experiments.

Anything better than Arctic Silver 5?

One new product that has rapidly generated buzz in the extreme cooling community is CoolLaboratory's Liquid Pro. This is a gallium-alloy (presumably galistan) that's liquid at room temperatures and has properties similar to mercury (minus the toxicity). The compound is a literally a pure liquid metal alloy. As a thermal interface, this compound is exceptional with 4 to 5 degree improvements over Arctic Silver being very common. The main reason this compound hasn't gained widespread acceptance is that it's difficult to work with, and the material will oxidize aluminum, meaning that only pure copper coolers can be used. Due to the difficulty of the install, we're only recommending Liquid Pro to experienced system builders running a water-cooled rig. The improvement over Arctic Silver 5 on conventional air cooling isn't substantial enough to warrant changing from Arctic Silver 5.

Arctic Silver 5 – 3.5g
$6

Zalman ZM-STG1 Thermal Compound
$10

Running Total: $551

System RAM

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We're going all-in with this system build. That means 4GB of RAM (even though a good 0.5GB of it will be lost in 32-bit operating systems due to reserved addresses). Choosing between low-latency DDR2-800 and high-bandwidth DDR2-1066 is somewhat of a conundrum. DDR2-800 C3 RAM is about as fast as DDR2-1066 C5 RAM in real-world applications (see our article on Core 2’s performance with DDR2-667, 800, and 1066MHz memory. Both DDR2-800C3 and DDR2-1066 RAM are spec'd for higher voltages (2.2V) which adds to system heat (in comparison to the TWIN2X2048-6400C4 which is spec'd for 2.1V operation). Corsair's TWIN2X2048-6400C3 is the flagship product from Corsair and offers the best overclockability as well. The 6400C4 and 6400C4Pro offer the best value though.

A few years back, most of us would have said that the added latency of DDR2 meant it was a poor compromise when compared against conventional DDR. Things have changed and DDR2 is now the standard of desktop and server memory. Right now, ECC memory is still outside the mainstream. This isn't likely to change anytime soon. If I left this PC on 24/7, I'd expect 3 memory bit errors to occur each year. (True for AMD-based non-ECC memory as well). Unless you were doing scientific computing or medical-related data processing, most people are going to accept this margin of error rather than add an extra 12.5% of capacity for ECC memory.

Thermal management will be a critical part of our system design. Therefore, we’ll be going with Corsair DOMINATOR modules.

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The case and power

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Even though we've chosen to go with the Micro ATX form factor, there's no excuse for compromising the power supply. As a general rule, power supply manufacturers have not paid as close attention to the power supply in SFF systems as they have with the larger units. With that in mind, our clear choice for the chassis was the SilverStone Temjin TJ-08.

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Power Supply

Nowadays, it's not enough that your power supply is stable. You want your power supply to be efficient. Seasonic was one of the first manufacturers to launch a PSU with >80% efficiency across a wide range of system loads, and since then other manufacturers have joined this group including Silverstone's Strider ST56F. In this case, we've gone with the new Corsair HX620. This is an over-engineered PSU with the distinct advantage of having three 12V rails (CPU, GPU, and motherboard) as opposed to the two +12V rails of the Seasonic and SilverStone. If you happen to be running a dual GPU configuration, the Corsair HX line of power supplies will be a great choice. Our testing with the HX620W has been very impressive. Voltages are exceptionally stable, and the removable cables do not appear to affect system stability.

620W of power is overkill in most micro-ATX systems, but this isn’t like most micro-ATX systems…

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Optical Drive

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The article title gave this away: we're going with a Blu-Ray burner. These aren't very cheap. There are three Blu-Ray drives that are readily available in the USA:
1) Pioneer's BDR-101A ($1000)
2) Sony BWU-100A ($750)
3) Panasonic SW-5582 ($1000)

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Graphics Card

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First some definitions:
HDCP = High-bandwidth digital content protection. This is an encryption system used to transmit video from a source such as a PC or set-top-player to a display.

HDMI = High-Definition Multimedia Interface. This is a physical and electrical system used to transmit data from a source such as a PC or set-top-player to a display. The data can be transmitted in clear-text or the data can be optionally encrypted with HDCP. Data refers to both audio and video. The video portion of HDMI can be converted to DVI. Due to the way licensing is priced, every HDMI display with a physical HDMI connector and HDMI logo ends up supporting HDCP.

AACS = Advanced Access Content System. This is the software technology used to encrypt the contents of the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc. This prevents you from taking a Blu-Ray movie and copying it your hard drive or BD-R. Hollywood movies are all protected by AACS. Home movies will not be.

ICT = Image Constraint Token. This is an optional feature that allows movie studios to dictate whether high-resolution sources can be transmitted over analog connections. It is scheduled to be a mandatory feature in 2009.
Here's what it all means:

	DVI or HDMI (w/HDCP)	DVI or HDMI (no-HDCP)	VGA or Component Video
Home-made HD-DVD/BD (no AACS, no ICT)	Full Resolution	Full Resolution	Full Resolution
HD-DVD/BD made in 2006 (AACS; no ICT)	Full Resolution	No display	Full Resolution
HD-DVD/BD made in 2009 (AACS and ICT)	Full Resolution	No display	No display or 1/4th resolution

This means that if you want to watch Hollywood movies on a digital video connection such as DVI or HDMI, you need HDCP, today and tomorrow.

So, NVIDIA or ATI?

While both NVIDIA and ATI have support for H.264 decoding and Blu-Ray's 1080p support, it was also important for our video card to do content-based 1080p 3:2 inverse telecine (taking the 1080i60 broadcasts on CBS and NBC and converting them to a true 1080p24). Currently, only NVIDIA offers this feature on the PC. In fact, this is a feature missing from most stand-alone HDTV sets, even the flagship 1080p monitors from Sony and Samsung!

Since I also needed HDCP support, my options included the 7600GT, 7900GT, and 7950 GX2. All three cards are superb choices in their respective price points. The MSI NX7600GT Diamond Plus would have been a good choice for a HTPC. While it's the slowest of the three cards in 3D performance, it's just as good as the 7950GX2 for video and it features HDCP/HDMI (so it transmits both audio and video over a single cable).

The 7950GX2 is a tempting proposition. This really brings dual GPU performance is a smaller package that was ever possible. It's two slots, but its slim two slot design means that it’ll fit just fine with our Temjin TJ-08 chassis.

In the end, my bias was to go with a XFX’s GeForce 7950GT. History has always shown that my system building articles end up having such a large lead time that a new flagship GPU ends up getting announced by the time the article is ready to go to press. Since the XFX GeForce 7950GT is passively cooled, a replacement for this board is unlikely to be released anytime soon. It’s so far ahead of the curve. I just hope the 7950GT is up for the monitor I’ve chosen…

XFX GeForce 7950GT
$320

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Monitor

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Dell 30" 3007WFP.

I would, unless I'm going with the Dell 30" LCD monitor. By going the HTPC route, I'm upsampling my 1920x1080p source content to 2560x1440. Just as 480p DVD's look better when upsampled to 720p, 1080p Blu-Ray looks better on a 30" 2560x1600 display than it does on a 37" 1920x1080p display due to the density of the sub-pixels.

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Dell 3007WFP Performance
	Color Temperature (White)	Color Temperature (Dark Gray)	Black level	White level	delta E	Contrast Ratio
Native (max brightness)	6447K	6722K	0.50	297.07	10.34	594:1
Native (min brightness)	6375K	6749K	0.18	106.28	10.27	590:1

TV tuning

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HDTV Tuner

Getting back to the topic though, we needed an HDTV tuner.

Our HDTV tuner of choice would have been the vBox Cat's Eye 164e. This is a PCI Express dual HDTV tuner that allows you record and watch live TV simultaneously (or record two different shows simultaneously while you're watching a Blu-Ray movie). These have been considered near-vaporware, but we’re in line for the September shipment of these units…

What about USB HDTV tuners?

The Artec T14 ATSC USB Tuner is one of the newest (and smallest) HDTV tuners on the market.

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Hard Drive

Moving to HDTV really highlights how important storage capacity really can be. Recording a 2 hour movie can take up over 20GB of space, depending on the bitrate the film is being broadcast with. 3 years ago, we built a "storage server" with a terabyte of storage. We had to go with a Tyan Trinity i875P board, a PCI ATA card to get all the ports we needed, and a PC Power & Cooling Power Supply. There were 5 drives in the machine and it just hit 1.15 TB of storage.

Three years later, and this amount of storage isn't so special anymore. Even though we've only got two 3.5" internal HDD drive bays, by using a quartet of 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives, I've got 3 terabytes of space... in a micro ATX chassis…

The secret behind this increase in HDD density is the advent of perpendicular recording heads.

As the microscopic magnetic grains that store the data in a HDD become smaller and smaller, the magnetic particles become so small and so tightly backed that they begin to interfere with each other. The result is corrupted data. The first technology advanced in the 2001 or so, when IBM "Pixie Dust" was introduced. This helped to hard drives reach the current density levels of 100 gigabits/square inch and is responsible for our 500GB HDD's.

In order to break the 500GB drive, hard drive manufacturers have moved to perpendicular recording heads. The technology behind this is quite complex and has to do with the geometry of perpendicular medium allowing the use of "magnetically stronger" materials because the actual read/write head is more efficient. Don't worry if that doesn't make sense.

It means that we're seeing 750GB this year and 1TB drives next year.

As we’ve seen earlier with the Hitachi T7K500, the increased density of these platters helps to improve read/write performance allowing these high-capacity 7200 rpm drives to compete against 10,000 rpm Raptor HDDs.

[Ed. At the time, the Seagate Barracuda ES was not available]

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, 750GB
4x $400

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The OS

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For all the attention that Windows Vista is getting, and MacOSX has been getting, there's no question that the OS engineers and interface artists behind Windows Media Center Edition 2005 have developed one of the best operating systems, ever.


It's easy to talk about the weaknesses of MCE2005. It requires that you buy a whole new Windows XP license. It requires an analog TV tuner before it'll let you use an ATSC HDTV tuner. It also limits your recording formats to WMA (instead of APE or FLAC) and DVR-MS files (instead of .TS MPEG-2). On the other hand, the rest of the operating is so well designed that you're willing to overlook those problems. The system powers on when it's time to record a show, keeps track of recorded films, and it even has a visually appealing interface. With MCE2005, the PC acts and feels like a system that just works. It's so much more intuitive than and more natural to work with than other similar programs whether it be Apple's Front Row or SnapStream's BeyondTV.

Still, our plan is to use Windows Vista on this machine. We’ve got a free license until June 2007 for the release candidates, and we’ll probably have to save some money, right…


Windows Vista Release Candidate 2
Free! (Until June 07)

Running Total: $3931

Components summary

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Like every system build before this one, I’ve always come up with the part list first. Then I work to round-up all the hardware I need. So to summarize, this is our original system spec to date...

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Gigabyte GA-965GM-S2
XFX GeForce 7950GT
4GB Corsair 8500C5D RAM
3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (4x 750GB)
Corsair HX620 Power Supply
Sony BWU-100A
Silverstone Temjin TJ-08 Chassis
vBox Cat’s Eye PCI-e Dual ATSC/Dual NTSC tuner
Zalman CNPS-9500


Then, as icing on the top, we decided to throw in one more trick into the system: an HD-DVD drive.

Now, we’d have a ridiculously over-the-top system.

We’d have a CPU that’s faster for workstation applications than a Dual Opteron 252.

We’d have a GPU that was ran as fast as GeForce 6800 SLI yet was passively cooled...

… while still giving better video quality for 1080i movies and “scripted” 1080i TV shows when compared to the flagship Sony and Samsung 1080p displays.

We’d have a PC that could play BOTH high-definition disc formats...

… and actually upsampled those Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies beyond HDTV resolutions.

We’d have a box that could record two HDTV shows at once while watching a third recording, out-doing any other commercially available TIVO…

… and 3 terabytes of storage to keep all those recordings, which would be more capacity than our old Budget Storage Server.

… that would run “virtually” silent thanks to the exclusive use of sub-1000 rpm 120mm fans from Silverstone and Zalman

… all in a micro ATX case.

…and with a 30” 2560x1620 Dell monitor too.

How cool does a system have to be where the 30” Dell monitor ends up being the most boring part of the build?

[Ed. That was the plan…]

The obstacles

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You see, Core 2 Duo’s are enthusiast machines for the moment. As a result, no motherboard manufacturer was planning on developing an enthusiast grade micro-ATX Core 2 Duo platform. The Gigabyte motherboards that were showcased in Computex simply were not available outside engineering samples.

Our first thought was to turn to alternatives. We could have gone with an Intel micro-ATX P965, but the lack of overclockability ruled it out immediately. Our micro-ATX board needed to have its PCI-e x1 slot away from the GPU’s x1 slot for optimal cooling. This limited our choices, but our next choice was ASUS P5M-VM. The ASUS board offers a similar layout to Gigabyte.

Of course, it turns out that ASUS also had placed the focus on their standard ATX Core 2 Duo motherboards. They didn’t have a micro-ATX board ready for the public yet either…

We struggled with the decision of whether to scrap the project or continue, but finally, Gigabyte Taiwan had a GA-965GM-S2 board ready for us. Our unit was one of the first retail-boards off the line.

Turns out that this was only a pyrrhic victory.

Obstacles (cont’d)

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So, I placed my order for my CPU on Newegg and started putting the motherboard and PSU into the case.

Obstacle #2

As I began to mount the four 750GB drives into the machine, I realized that the hidden 3.5” bays in the TJ-08 could not be configured as “stealth” internal 3.5” drive bays. Most drive bay covers pop-in or screw-in superficially. The TJ-08 has much deeper drive bay covers. This is awesome when you want drive bay covers that are solid – not so awesome if you’re trying to put 4 HDDs into a microATX case. That’s alright though, we can stagger the HDDs. It’s going to be a tight fit, but it’ll work.

Obstacle #3

The next problem I discovered is that the MicroATX chassis wasn’t going to have clearance for DOMINATOR or even Corsair XMS2 Pro RAM. This meant going down to standard XMS2 RAM. In a normal standard ATX case, going with XMS2 6400C3 would be fine. In this MicroATX setup with 4 7200RPM drives and a fanless GPU, thermal management is going to be the big challenge.

As a precaution, I went with XMS2 6400C4. These memory modules from Corsair are rated at 2.1V, and therefore should run slightly cooler. We’ll still run 4GB though.

2x Corsair TWINX20486400C4
$300 x 2

Running Total: $3931 - $800 + $600 = $3731

Obstacle #4

After mounting everything together, I did a quick double check to make sure the heatsink fit into the chassis. It was at this point I noticed the next problem. While the heatsink fits perfectly into the Micro ATX case, the staggered HDDs and tight space would mean that my SATA and power cables were going to get tangled up into the CPU cooler. There was no way I could go with a smaller cooler. I was depending on the CPU fan to keep the rest of the system cool (HDD and GPU).

The solution? Reverse mount the CPU cooler. Instead of blowing air from the front of the case to the rear of the case, I’d reverse the cooling so that the 120mm fan in the rear was also acting as an intake. One of the challenges with this type of the approach is making sure that the system wasn’t recycling hot air coming out from the PSU.

The other question is whether we reverse the front fan as well. Reversing the flow of the front fan makes a lot of sense because it’ll ensure that hot air gets extracted. If I could reverse the PSU fan, it’d be perfect. The other approach is keeping the front fan the same way. The airflow will then go through the Corsair PSU, as it’s the path of least resistance. This will keep the PSU cooler itself and in turn the exhaust from the PSU cooler as well. I decided to go on the second mode… should keep things easier.

Obstacle #5

The TJ-08 has a removable motherboard tray. Perfect, right? Actually the CNPS-9500 is so big that once you mount the heatsink on the outside, you can’t fit it back into the chassis. You have to mount the motherboard tray first and then mount the heatsink in a traditional fashion. A stupid mistake, but that’s what happens when you get used to extended ATX systems :)

More growing pains

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At this point, it seemed like thermal management was going to be the big hurdle. But I was feeling confident that I had gotten it under adequate control. Even without cable management, I was certain that the cooling was adequate for system stability, and I knew I still had plenty of tricks I could use to improve system cooling. I thought my hurdles were complete…

Obstacle #6

The system POST’d without incident and it was amazing. The low-rpm 120mm fans were incredibly quiet, and in fact, the DVD-ROM was louder than the system. I went into BIOS and we hit our first snag.

No overclocking abilities.

Doh! But the GA-965GM-S2 had the same VRM module that Gigabyte’s enthusiast P965 motherboards used, and Gigabyte knew that we were going to be using this motherboard in a gaming system… a quick email to Gigabyte and we discovered that our “fresh off the production line” motherboard did not have any overclocking abilities yet, but that a future revision of the BIOS (F1) would likely add FSB overclocking.

Obstacle #7

Windows Vista RC1 -> Blue Screen of Death at install. Somehow our ACPI BIOS isn’t 100% compliant. Doh. I guess Microsoft software is buggy... We send a quick email to Gigabyte.

A few days later and RC2 comes out! Woo hoo! We still get the same BSOD. Gigabyte suggests that we try the newer F2 bios which supports Cloverfield (can you imagine this same system with a quad core CPU?).

We try the new BIOS. No luck. Maybe the Gigabyte BIOS is what’s buggy… We report our findings to Gigabyte Taiwan and they get to work.

Two weeks later, and Gigabyte still cannot replicate our results. Windows Vista installs just fine for them. They have encountered a similar BSOD when the memory is overclocked during the Vista Install, but assure us that once Vista is installed, the memory can be overclocked without troubles.

We try slowing down the timings in case the motherboard isn’t supplying the proper voltage to the DIMMs. Still no luck.

We decide to drop the system down to a regular 2GB of RAM. Success! Vista installs.

The question remains why the GA-965GM-S2 is having trouble with our 4GB of RAM. Are the Corsair modules too fast for the motherboard? Unlikely. We should have seen the same problems with 2GB of memory. If I had to guess, it may have to do with the reserved space for PCI devices. 32-bit systems are not capable of using the full 4GB of memory due to memory addressing issues. In that case, going to a 64-bit operating system and using either software or hardware memory hole remapping should work – we’ll have to test with Windows Vista x64.

But after 3 months of trying to get this project off the ground…

Performance, conclusion

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My first benchmark was a finite element simulation of whiplash from one of my research projects. These simulations can take a hundred hours to complete and so every last bit of performance counts. To my surprise, the Core 2 Duo at 2.4GHz was about 10% slower than my Dual AMD Opteron 252 at 2.6GHz.

This was certainly a surprising finding considering all the other benchmarks which have showed the Core 2 Duo as being consistently superior to the AMD platform. Both systems were configured for 2GB of RAM, and the Opteron was running slow DDR-333 ECC RAM versus the Core 2 Duo’s DDR2-800C4! Since these simulations require double-precision FP math, it’s very likely that the Opteron’s FPU continues to be a strong performer. I’ll really need to compare 64-bit math to see if these comparison pans out.

The second benchmark I did was to test RAW processing performance using Bibble 4.90. In this case, the Core 2 Duo at 2.4GHz was 50% faster than the Dual Opteron at 2.6GHz. This is huge, since digital photography continues to be one of the most CPU-intensive, non-gaming applications in the mainstream. If the Core 2 Duo is already 50% faster in its stock form, I can only imagine how fast things will get once we start overclocking!

It Finally Ends…

Obviously, we’ll do more benchmarks once we get the BIOS from Gigabyte allowing us to use 4GB of RAM. We haven’t heard back from them yet.

We also haven’t received our vBox PCI-e HDTV tuner from the “September shipment” yet. Until then, this system remains tunerless.

Lastly, our dream of the ultimate HD-DVD and Blu-Ray HTPC has proved to be impossible. The plan was to use a 30” 2560x1600 display, but there isn’t a graphics card on the market today that’ll support DVI/HDCP with the Dell 3007WFP at 2560x1600. It’s a limitation of both the monitor and the GPU…

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