Faster Performance For Gamers

Every time we buy a new piece of hardware, or even a whole system, we're faced with choices, and many times, those choices are compromises. What if we didn't have to compromise? What if we could build a system from scratch that uses nothing but best-of-breed components? We asked these questions in last year's edition of the Ultimate Game Machine, and the answer was an affordable gaming PC with lots of bells and whistles.

Now it's a year later, and the Pentium 133 is the entry level. The good news is that computer components don't follow the national inflation rate, so this year's system is actually less expensive than last year.

Even if you had an unlimited purse, there are still lots of choices to make. You can't even go by magazine reviews, because different magazines often contradict each other. In my case, I applied 15 years of performance tuning, hardware experience and good old gut-level instinct to come up with this year's ultimate rig. You may quibble with some of the choices I made, and there may be products available now which I couldn't test when I wrote this, but overall I know you'll be pleased with this system's performance and peripherals. But enough talk, let's see the system.

There's no competition here, yet. Intel's 200 MHz Pentium Prois the current king of the heap for X86 compatible processors. In most cases, the Pentium Pro is at least as fast, if not faster, in 16-bit performance than a Pentium 200. In 32-bit apps, it's not even a contest--and most games these days are 32-bit applications. A few games, such as DUKE NUKEM 3D, make heavy use of 8 and 16 bit operations, which are not the Pro's strong suit, but even then, DUKE's performance on a Pentium Pro should satisfy even hard-core Dukeheads. And for those of you in the QUAKE camp, the Pro's superior floating-point performance makes game-play at 640 x 400 smooth instead of jerky.

The Pro got a bad rap early on for a couple of reasons. For one, Intel released the 150 MHz Pentium Pro, which didn't clock as fast as the high end of the Pentium family at the time, the Pentium 166. In addition, the sole core logic chip-set--which lets the CPU talk to the PC motherboard--was supplied by Intel, and had a couple of major performance-draining bugs.

That's all over now. The 200 MHz chip is as fast as the Pentium Pro line comes, and the best chip-set currently is the Natoma 440FX chip-set, also from Intel, that fixes many of the problems of the older Orion glue logic. Natoma supports EDO DRAM, PCI concurrency and a host of other neat features that help speed data through the system. It's even capable of supporting two Pentium Pros, but we decided that would be overkill--there aren't any commercial games that support multiple processors.

One very handy tool is a piece of software, FastVid, that turns on key Pentium features to accelerate graphics data, particularly DOS VGA and SVGA data. Without FastVid, you have a very fast computer that has okay graphics. With FastVid, you have a very fast computer that also is a game graphics hot rod--if the graphics card can handle it.

Gaming PC