Building The Fastest Desktop Possible

hero_or_what writes "Tom's Hardware has built one the fastest PCs on the planet. Its basically an overclocked Athlon running at 1600MHZ!! The beast is described here. I wonder how long this monster would take to do a "make world"."

Comments

Re:Fast is good, but stable is better...

[volsung]

Computers are designed to compute. That's it. You can use them comercially or personally. Some people want to tinker, and some want stability. These guys built a 1600MHz Athlon not to slap on their desk at work, but to play with and see what the current technology can do. I don't think anyone is going to tell their boss that making a server out of one of these things is a good idea.

I say run the processors at whatever speed you like. Just understand the potential consequences.

Re:Time to make world

[smartin]

That was a long time ago, things have improved considably since then.

I'll take quantity over speed, thanks.

[benmhall]

Seriously, 1.6GHz sounds VERY impressive, but I'll take more CPU's and better components over a faster CPU any day.

I've had my Dual 466 Celeron for over a year and a half now, and it's absolutely fantastic, and rock-solid stable. Sure, I've upgraded the RAM over that time from 128MB to 512, but through it all I've felt no need to upgrade the processor(s)

The motherboard recently went south on me and I had to replace it. I got looking around and noticed that Asus now has a dual PIII board for ~$230CDN. I ended up just RMAing this board, but I know when I do eventually need to upgrade there's no WAY I'll be going back to a single processor board.

If you're running Linux, FreeBSD or Win2k (or even BeOS) an SMP system makes a world of difference under heavy load. Recompiling? Encoding MP3's? Running VMWare? These operations are sped up very noticeably.

For people looking for a new machine: Save your precious dollars on the fastest processor. Fill up on RAM, get a good video card, and get an SMP board. I'd rather have 2 800MHz chips than a 1.6GHz any day of the week.

AMD: I'd rather get an SMP chipset out of you than Yet Another "Fastest" Processor. I'd much rather own a Duron or Athalon than a crappy Celeron or PIII, but I'd take an SMP Celeron over a single Duron..

Lowrider

[Pope Slackman]

I wanna see a Lowrider computer magazine.
I mean, chromed RAID arrays, hydraulic monitor positioning,
overstuffed, ergonomic workstations, boxes covered with shaggy purple fur, golden G4 cubes buffed to a mirror-like finish...

THAT's where it's at.

--K

My 486

[sharkey]

$make world.c
Hmmm.... immeaurable by the naked eye. Let's see if it runs.
$./world
"Hello, World."
Yippee! Don't need no 1600MHz Athlon to make my world!

--

Re:Why must everything be so fast?

[oops]

I didn't finish this. Who has time to read 6 paragraphs ?

"make world"...

[Snard]

I wonder how long this monster would take to do a "make world".

Six days?

Non x86 processors?

[sl3xd]

How 'bout some comparisons between some non-x86 processors?

I've never seen anything about how fast a fired-up Alpha can go.

Or how fast the 1.6 GHz Athlon compares to the 733 MHz G4 (Except from Apple, of course)

I use an X86 processor too... but there's better stuff out there.

Re:Fast is good, but stable is better...

[plover]

Its all very well having a 1600GHz Athlon on your desk, but what use it it if Windows crashes every five minutes because you are overheating?

News flash: processor heat is probably not to blame for Windows crashing.

The reason for the overclocking is really to get the Windows boxes to reboot faster after a crash. Have you timed an NT reboot lately? 1600MHz might make it endurable.

Is it just me or does anyone else agree that we should really confine ourselves to running our CPUs at the speed they were designed for rather than some arbitary speed we choose?

Seriously, I think it's just you. Remember, CPUs are designed to run as fast as possible. The limitations being sidestepped by the overclocking crowd are physical world limits: heat will cause failures in the CMOS semiconductor junctions. You sound like you are saying we should remove our fans and heat sinks and run our 500MHz boxes at 33MHz, because that's what God intended.

Don't confuse the engineering limits with the marketeering limits set by the Intel folks, either. They don't want people overclocking their cheap chips (and so avoid paying the premium for "faster" chips), so they put in circuitry designed to detect and prevent overclocking. They claim it's to "protect their name", but it's strictly financial.

John

Re:Why must everything be so fast?

[seanmeister]

....waiting while that tape drive chugged away - that was half the fun of it.Nowadays, everything's instantaneous, and people don't realize the fun of waiting.....We should take the time out to enjoy life every now and then.

...Which is exactly what you SHOULD be doing instead of watching your tape drive chug away. While I agree with you in that the "ever faster pace of life" can be kinda hard on the ol' personal well-being, I don't think that (topic)faster computers(/topic) are a part of the problem. I certainly have better, more fulfilling things to do than sit around while my kernel compiles. The quicker my system boots and connects to the net, the quicker I can check the local events, weather, whatever, and get the hell out into the sunlight.

Sean

It'll Never Happen

[TheNecromancer]

Tom's Hardware Guide is unfortunately not a car magazine (yet...),

Somehow I don't think that babes in bikinis dripping over the latest PC system will sell magazines(I could be wrong).