Build a 'Double-Powered' Gaming PC

By Jason Compton

July 17, 2006

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The key to building a powerful and speedy PC for gamers and other computing enthusiasts is simple: Throw in two of everything!

Take a look at what the competition is doing. First-tier manufacturers of CPUs, graphics processors and system chipsets have recently discovered that a fast, easy and cost-saving way to boost a PC's performance is simply to double-up on whatever the system needs for power and speed. The process began several years ago, when motherboard chipset designers and RAM companies realized they could improve overall system performance by including two memory controllers instead of just one. Thus was born dual-channel memory.

Later came "RAID striping," or enabling two disks to be ganged together to form one large virtual disk. This became popular as motherboard builders and chipset designers began incorporating RAID directly into their designs, even for low-end systems.

More recently, this trend has gone straight to the silicon. Both Intel and AMD have decided to take a breather from escalating clock speeds and instead focus on packing more computing power into a single chip package. That philosophy gave rise to Intel's Pentium D and Celeron D lines, and AMD's Athlon 64 X2, which are all "dual-core" designs that effectively turn a single-socket computer into a dual-processor machine.

Even the graphics-chip companies have gotten into the act. Nvidia and ATI have both reintroduced a technique not seen since the late 1990s, when the now-defunct firm 3dfx Interactive shipped the Voodoo graphics card, which was SLI, or "scan line interleave" capable. In essence, SLI technique let users gang together two video cards to act as one, leading to faster, more detailed 3D rendering. While 3dfx is no longer with us, SLI did survive. Today Nvidia calls SLI "scalable link interface," but the net result is the same: Put two video cards together to do the work of one, and a video game's frame rates and explosions-per-minute go through the roof.

Ingredients

• Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard: The heart of our system will be Nvidia's Nforce4-based A8N-SLI motherboard.
  
  

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