Beasty

Computers are just tools, like spanners, hair driers and craft knives. But they are also something more, something unique in the history of human technology. For me, the computer is a means to exploring my imagination, a supreme tool for expanding my knowledge and understanding of the world. And a great source of entertainment. And since the advent of the Internet, you don't have to withdraw from society in order to indulge in the digital world.

Taking high-performance computing seriously, for me, means building a new PC every three years. For general computing, such as web browsing and writing, this is unnecessary. If you're involved in 3D graphics though, or like to play the latest computer games, three years is a period of time in which a top-of-the-range PC transforms into an antique electronic sloth.

Three years ago I was starting out with 3DS Max and the machine I built was aimed at handling modelling work. Three years on and that machine, running two Athlon XP M1800's is still reasonably capable for that job of basic modelling.

The new "beast" was specified to be able to match and exceed the twin cpu machines modelling capabilities, and also surpass it in general performance, games and multimedia. I looked at the cost of a twin Opteron machine, but felt that the performance benefits would be outweighed by the very high cost associated with the necessary specialist parts such as the motherboard, extended ATX casing etc.

The machine I ended up going for is an AMD 64 FX-55, a variant of the Opteron, for the "spoilt geek" market. In the measure of performance-per-pound, the FX-55 loses out to the only slightly slower (but a lot cheaper) mass-market chips. However, I fealt that with a three year life, I should get the fastest chip I could afford. At the time of writing, the FX-55 was pretty much the fastest chip available on the consumer market.

New innovations I was able to benefit from, where: Faster DDR Ram, a raid controller on the Asus A8V deluxe motherboard, allowing me to run two 160 Gbyte hard disk drives as a single, double bandwidth drive.

The Gainward Nvidia Geforce 6800 GT is an upper middleweight card, about half the cost of the Quadro FX1000 I had intended to buy. Alas the Quadro went out-of-stock the day before I intended to make my order. So the Gainward card will fill in till next year.


Coolermaster Wavemaster (The lovely blue one)
420 watt Hi-power PSU
Asus A8V Deluxe (without the wifi)
AMD 64 FX-55
1 Gbyte of Corsair TwinX DDR Ram
2 IBM / Hitachi Deskstar HDD with 160 Gigabytes each
LG DVD Burner
Gainward Geforce 6800 GT