Taking the Express

By Jerry Pournelle

August 23, 2004

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Wendy

The new machine is Wendy, an Intel D925XCV system with a Prescott 3.6 GHz. The board is in the older ATX form factor but has many features similar to the new BTX systems that will be coming out: a taste of the future, but not quite the future.

(For an in-depth review of the latest HP/Compaq dual Xeon workstation using the same CPU cores, see David Em and my son Alex's review.)

BTX boards won't fit in ATX cases. This board is a lot like your older ATX boards, but with different slots. (For a lot more on ATX and BTX, see here.) The D925XCV has no AGP video bus; instead it uses a 16-lane PCI-Express slot. It also has two ordinary PCI Bus slots, and I presume I could have put a video card in one of those if I'd had one.

The board, chip, and heatsink/fan came while I was on a trip, and when I got back it was close getting it built in time for this month's column, especially since there were no documents or installation disks. I might not have rushed into it, but it is Intel's flagship. I do like, from time to time, to have the latest and greatest, and this is a real barn-burner, certainly the fastest machine I have. However: Looking around Chaos Manor I discovered I not only had no PCI-Express video cards (hardly a surprise) but I have thrown out or replaced all the PCI video cards as well. I've got a lot of old cards, but they are all AGP. Next I looked into old machines. One, BIG SYS, which sat upstairs in the Monk's Cell for years and has only a 350 MHz Celeron, looked to be a prime candidate, but alas, it has an on-board video card. Other systems were the same: either on-board video or AGP.

So: out to Fry's. I knew I was getting a hot new NVIDIA GeForce 6, but it hadn't come yet, and a PCI slot board would let me get everything else installed. I also needed some Serial ATA disk drive cables.

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