Review: The Ultimate PC For 2006

With the average computer becoming obsolete (or so the tale goes) by the time it arrives at your home, it takes an incredible amount of hubris to attempt to define the ultimate performance PC for an entire year. But here I go anyway. One note of caution: Remember, these are my selections, based on my experience and opinion. Feel free to disagree. I don't mind at all.

In The Beginning Was The CPU

Processor selection is always difficult, even though there are only two real choices: AMD and Intel. After testing both an Athlon FX60 and an Intel Pentium 955 Extreme Edition (XE), I'm going with Intel for this project, but it could have gone either way with these two dual-core processors. That's how close they are in performance.Had the purpose behind this exercise in excess been to create a gaming PC, the FX60 would have been my choice in a heartbeat. In the tests I ran, it pumped data in and out of its dual-core interior with a speed that embarrassed its Intel counterpart—a gamer's dream. However, a synthetic benchmark, called COSBI OpenSourceMark, left the pair tied toe-to-toe in their general ability to do work. And when I got to an application near and dear to my heart—video rendering—the Pentium 955XE walked away from the FX60 with ease and speed.

By the way, when I talk about video rendering, I'm not talking about a "here are the clips, go render me a video" type of project. I change bit rates in both the video and audio, I modify the frame type, readjust the compression, and display the video while rendering. It's heavy lifting, and the FX60 just wasn't as good at it by a significant amount.

Yes, the dual-core Athlons are more elegantly designed and have more L1 cache than the dual-core Pentiums. They also use less power. But that's all IT pap—none of it has real meaning on the desktop. There, it's a matter of what does what I want done best. If I had to deftly explain the situation, it would be that the 955XE just has more muscle.

One small tidbit: According to the folks at Intel, the Pentium 955 Extreme Edition is unlocked and should prove interesting to anyone who dabbles in overclocking. That's a major change in policy for Intel, but it needs to encroach on traditional AMD territory to re-establish its competitiveness.

$1,106 - $1,204

Motherboard

Having selected the processor, we can now choose a motherboard: the ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe. (If you're still smarting over my choice of the Pentium instead of the Athlon, here's an out for you: The ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe is the Athlon version of this motherboard. The pricing should be comparable.)Its list of particulars will cover almost any situation you're likely to encounter (the Wi-Fi edition even supports onboard wireless networking), and its use of heatpipes, instead of buzzy little fans, to keep the chipsets cool will also help keep things quiet.

The SLI (Scalable Link Interface technology developed by nVidia) portion of the name probably clues you in to the fact that you can double up on SLI-compatible graphics cards and increase the overall graphics performance. But as you'll see when we get there, we're not going to go there. SLI will get you a little extra performance if you're gaming in the extreme, but even in the Ultimate PC, it can be a bit of overkill for almost everything else.

Odds are good that you'll want for nothing when it comes to external communications. The P5N32-SLI has ten USB 2.0/1.1 ports, two FireWire IEEE-1394a ports, and dual Gigabit LAN ports; the Wi-Fi edition of the board includes an integrated wireless LAN port (plus antenna) as well. It won't let you interface with an old Commodore PET, but there's very little else you can't talk to.

ASUS' AI NOS (Non-delay Overclocking System), PEG (PCI Express Graphics) Link Mode, and C.P.R. (CPU Parameter Recall) should be of special interest if your intention is to make your processor perform a bit more robustly than Intel initially intended it to.

$198 - $244Memory

The P5N32-SLI supports a maximum of 4 GB of memory; we're going to split the difference at 2 GB and use a pair of 1 GB Crucial Technology Ballistix memory modules. It's a "performance" memory product and, again, will have its biggest impact if you decide to adjust the CPU's and bus' clock rate.

(Note to you stubborn AMD people: ASUS has partnered with Corsair to produce a memory product specific to the A8N32-SLI motherboard and the Athlon processor: the Corsair XMS-3500LL Pro. It's sold in matched pairs, two sticks of 1 GB capacity each, 2 GB in total. If you dig around, you might even find that it's a bit less expensive than the Crucial memory.)$361

Graphics Card

Although the P5N32-SLI motherboard is Scalable Link Interface-compliant (using two 16-bit PCIe slots, the "32" part of its name), we're going to sidestep the SLI issue for now—but not by a whole lot. We'll be equipping our Ultimate PC with an eVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX KO graphics card. It's one of the fastest you'll currently find, and it's half of an SLI solution.By doing this, you get the graphics speed this system deserves with the ability to complete the SLI pair later, if you feel it's needed. Considering that the best price on these cards is currently around $500 each (and some of the emerging versions from other vendors go up from there), the 7800 GTX KO is the second most expensive component of this system, just behind the processor itself. One will do for now.

$555 - $587

Sound

Back when audio first reared its head as an integrated component on motherboards, the technology was pathetic, little better than your basic comb wrapped in tissue paper. Things have changed since then.

The P5N32-SLI benefits from a Realtek ALC850 8-channel codec and offers the usual universal audio jacks, audio sensing and enumeration technology, and coaxial/optical S/PDIF out ports on the back I/O panel. Translation: It's real cool stuff and no plug-in audio card is needed.Price:  Included with motherboard

Making A Case

While your motherboard, processor, and all its plug-in thingies could spend their time sitting on your desk, they're hardly ideal candidates for sculpture. They need a home of their own and that means a case, a power supply, and some internal fans. We're going to collect all those goodies from one company: Antec Inc.

For the case, we'll go with Antec's Performance P160. It's a lightweight aluminum model with rails for 5.25-inch devices and trays to hold your 3.5-inch drives. The trays use isolation mounts to dampen any vibrations from the drives. All told, you'll have room for four 5.25-inch and two 3.5-inch external drives, while four more 3.5-inch drives will fit inside. There's even a removable tray that makes motherboard installations a breeze.

The three large oval cutouts up front allow air to be drawn into the case. They're backed by a washable filter to keep the fuzzies out of your computer, and an optional (I'd say essential) 120 mm fan can be installed behind them to cool the hard drives in those lower four internal bays. You will have to put up with a blue glow wafting from behind those vents—unless you unplug the LEDs.

Up top is an LED temperature status display for two user-definable zones as well as front-mounted USB, FireWire, and audio ports. (The top of the case is the ideal position for ports on a floor-mounted system.)

$82 - $99

Power To The Rails

This Antec P160 case has one small flaw: It doesn't have power supply. It's not a big deal. We're going to put an Antec Phantom 500 PSU inside. It's 550 watts maximum, which might seem a little like overkill to you, but trust me, it's not. Well, maybe not a lot of overkill.

The smaller version of the Phantom (350 watts) has no fan whatsoever. That makes it one of the quietest power supplies you can buy. Big brother PSU does have a fan, but it works via a thermostat that you can set for any of three heat ranges (40, 47.5, or 55 degrees C, or roughly 104, 118, or 131 degrees F). When the internal temperature reaches your selected value, that's when the fan switches on, and it only stays on until the temperature drops below that value. It's not totally silent, but this hybrid fan design is the next best thing.

Just for extra measure, it has dual +12 V outputs with dedicated circuits to isolate the CPU power line from peripherals, and it's claimed to be 86 percent efficient at full load. Yes, it has SATA hard drive power connectors as well as those needed by PCIe graphics cards.$147 - $282

Cooling The Beast

The CPU heatsink and fan should do a good job of keeping your processor from boiling over (it's included in the box with the processor), but there's more than just the CPU in that case. Luckily for you, the P160 already has a 120 mm fan drawing air from inside and pushing it out through a grill in the back panel.

(120 mm fans, by the way, are great. Spinning at the same rate as the more typical 80 mm versions, they move about 30+ percent more air. Slowed down to the point where they move the same amount of air as the smaller fans, the 120 mm versions are incredibly quieter.)

So the first thing you're going to do is rip out the fan that's supplied with the P160. Not to fear. You'll be replacing it with one of Antec's 120 mm SmartCool case fans. Like the one in the power supply, these are also thermally controlled and the fan speed increases as the temperature inside the case rises. Maximum fan noise occurs only at maximum heat. Don't forget a second one for the front panel to keep your hard drives cool too.

$12 - $20 each

Hard Drives

The key to a great hard drive experience is speed and capacity. Those qualities need not apply to the same drives. To prove that, we're going to stock our Ultimate PC with a pair of Western Digital 150 GB 10,000 rpm Raptor SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration used for the boot partition.

(There's also the Raptor X if you want the same drive but with a clear acrylic top and a higher price tag.)

The Raptors are the speed demons of the desktop, just short of some exotic SCSI configurations best left to servers. Until now, they've never been big in the capacity department, but the new 150 GB version changes that. While that's still not the Grand Canyon of capacity, the 300 GB virtual RAID drive that results from combining two of them is no slouch in any sense of the word.

$283 - $350

On the data side of the storage equation we'll be adding a pair of 400 GB Western Digital Caviar RE2 SATA drives, again in a RAID 0 configuration, for a total of 800 GB.

Why bother? Well, the simple truth is that no matter how fast a hard drive is, if you try to read and write to the same drive at the same time, it slows down as the read/write heads do a two-step across the patter to get a byte from here and put it over there. Keeping separate source and destination drives is always the better idea.

$209 - $313If you're wondering why I haven't mentioned the motherboard's RAID 1, 0+1, or five redundancy capabilities for data security, that's a good catch on your part. What it all amounts to is that each of those options is less efficient in terms of overall system performance (and, in some ways, cost as well) than doing it outside of the box when it comes to a desktop PC.

The better option for the desktop today is to add any of the available Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions that provide backup and data sharing. That may sound more like an enterprise, rather than desktop, solution, and in some ways it is. It's also indicative of the overlap that has developed between these previously separate computing identities.

Optical Drives Are In

Building the Ultimate PC, you'd naturally think that you should scoop up one of those Blu-ray optical drives that Pioneer showed off at CES as soon as one is available retail. As an habitual early adopter, and owner of several now obsolete 1x DVD-RAM burners that had outrageous price tags, let me give you a word of advice: Don't.I'm not saying that you'll need to wait for version 2.0 (although the time lag between 1x and 16x DVD burners wasn't really that long), but you never know, someone may actually release a dual-format Blu-ray/HD DVD drive and you'll end up sitting there with a trophy in your case.

For now, we're going to populate two of the P160's 5.25-inch bays with a pair of Pioneer DVR-R100 optical drives. They're dual-layer, +/-, 16x devices that write CDs as well, and Pioneer claims that these drives generate 75 percent less noise during playback. Having two makes copying your own DVDs or CDs a one-step process. It also leaves you with two unused 5.25-inch bays to fill later with the Blu-ray or HD DVD drives of your choice.

$73 - $95 eachThe Floppy Isn't Dead

You may have heard rumors that the floppy drive is a dinosaur best left untouched. Not true, at least not totally. It's cheap insurance (like the fire extinguisher you keep in the kitchen and garage) against something unreasonable happening to your computer's BIOS.

In theory, you can upgrade or restore a BIOS from a USB floppy drive or even from CD, and that's probably true 99.8 percent of the time. The $8 to $10 you'll spend on an internal floppy drive will cover you for that remaining 0.2 percent. Don't worry about a brand name—inside the case they're all the same.

$5 - $10

Don't Forget A Flash Memory Card Reader

And because the P160 case has two 3.5-inch external bays, you might as well toss in a Sabrent 52-in-1 card reader/writer (CRW-INWB). Personally, I didn't know that there were 52 varieties of flash memory, but with all the different memory sticks and whatnot, it has you covered for almost everything. Besides, for the $20 you're likely to pay for it, what the heck.

$20

Odds And Ends

In the end, you're left to your own resources for keyboards and mice (Bluetooth remote, if it was up to me!), speakers, and a monitor as well. You'll probably choose an LCD display for the last, and it befits a system such as this.

One note of caution on this last choice: As with dentures, you shouldn't buy an LCD panel through the mail—at least not without an excellent return policy.

Sure, you can read about sizes (15-inch is out of vogue, 17-inch is currently mainstream, while 19-inch and larger are considered top tier), contrast ratios, brightness, and every other hardware specification, but you can't see what it looks like—and you should, up close and personal. You want to know what the range of color adjustment is, you want to see if black is really black or some attempt at blending purple and blue, you need to experience how white white can be before everything else on the screen washes out.

Those are things that can be talked about in ads and reviews ad nauseam, but the true cognitive quality of these features can only be experienced. Do yourself a favor, this one time, and go take a look.Price Tag

We've been breaking it to you gently as we went along, but just in case math isn't your strong suit, here's what you can expect to spend for your screaming new system—and that's before you've bought a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and speakers (not to mention tax and shipping). But hey, ultimateness doesn't come cheap.

Bill O'Brien can be blamed for more than 2,000 articles on computers and technology topics. With his writing partner, Alice Hill, Bill co-authored "The Hard Edge," the longest running (1992 to 2004) technology column penned by a techno duo. For more, go to technudge.com.