May 12th, 2006
4GHz Dual Core Game PC at $825!
I came across an article at TomsHardware where they did an over-clocking review of the Intel Pentium D 805 where they took a 2.66 GHz $130 budget CPU and turn it in to a 4.1 GHz monster. At 4.1 GHz, the Pentium D 805 could beat some of the best AMD and Intel Extreme Edition CPUs (when left at stock speeds) that cost more than $1000. Of course in reality people who buy those Extreme Edition processors from AMD and Intel Who needs an XBox360 or a Sony PS3 when you can experience the full richness of a computer? will clock their CPUs even higher but the fact that a budget CPU can reach Extreme Edition stock speeds is truly amazing. Any time a CPU can be over-clocked by a factor of 50% over stock speeds, it reminds me of the legendary king of over-clocking Intel Celeron 300 MHz CPU that people were routinely clocking to 450 MHz. Most hardware geeks like me will probably remember those days seven years ago.
This got me interested in seeing how cheap I could build a super fast water-cooled extreme gaming computer so I decided to put a detailed list together here.
Of course you can substitute your own parts depending on your personal preferences and I’m just offering a general guideline. The trick was to find the right motherboard that would support this latest over-clocking freak of a CPU from Intel and the right liquid cooling system that would allow for stable and non-throttled performance at 4 GHz. Here is what I came up with and an explanation of why I selected the part:
| Table of components | ||
| Part | Cost | Description |
| ECS C19-A SLI | 79 | Mother board with gigabit LAN |
| Pentium D 805 | 128 | CPU |
| R120 | 89 | Water cooler (4 GHz +) |
| X800GTO2 | 158* | 256 MB PCI-E Video |
| CAV-T03-UW | 60 | Cooler Master case |
| S12-430 | 97 | SeaSonic 430W power supply |
| ST3300822AS | 100 | 300 GB hard drive |
| SHW-160P6S04 | 40 | 16x DVD +/- RW recorder |
| MAC412UOE | 74 | 2×512 MB DDR2 RAM |
| Sub total | 825 | Not including shipping plus tax |
* Might need power connector for $3
Motherboard:
Even though Tom’s article showed motherboards from ASUS and Giga-byte, I wasn’t satisfied with the options. One of the Giga-byte motherboards was quite inexpensive at less than $60 but it didn’t have a PCI-Express slot and didn’t have support for DDR2 memory so it was ruled out as an option. The ASUS motherboards were a bit expensive for my taste and so were the higher end Giga-byte solutions. Since I’ve personally had good experiences with ECS (Elitegroup Computer Systems) of Taiwan, I thought I would see what they had something cheap that would run the newest Intel Pentium D 805 with all the features I wanted. As a result of my search, I found the ECS C19-A SLI which was not only relatively cheap, but it had everything I wanted such as:
- DDR2 667 memory support for FSB 1066
- 64-bit support
- Gigabit LAN
- 4 Serial-ATA2 ports
- 4 Parallel ATA-133 ports
- USB 2.0
- RAID 0-5
- 8-channel audio
- Simple nTune over-clocking tool
In addition to all that, the board includes SLI (dual video card support) capability for even more extreme gaming. While I’m not 100% convinced about SLI based solutions yet, I’ll have to leave the SLI system for another day.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
| 05/12/06
