My PC

My workstation. Consists of:

Core bits

AMD Duron 850MHz

Currently running at 1009MHz and 1.85V.

Asus A7V motherboard

128Mb generic PC133 CAS2

Well, it was supposed to be CAS2 but Dabs sold me CAS3 by mistake. They did give my lots of cash in compensation though. It still runs at CAS2 though ;o)

128Mb Crucial PC133 CAS2

Graphics and sound

Creative Labs GeForce DDR 32Mb

Getting really long in the tooth now, this. The stock fan died so I lapped the core (thanks for your help, Martin) and fitted a Blue Orb instead. It didn't make much difference, but at least it's more reliable that the crappy thing Creative Labs fitted it with.

Connected to a...

Hansol 710P 17" monitor

Cheap and nasty S3 Virge PCI graphics card

Connected to a...

Radius 21" GDM-1950 monitor

This is an old workstation monitor from a Mac. It's fixed frequency, so it only runs at exactly 1152x882x72Hz (well, almost only that, anyway), but 21" of goodness only cost me, in total, a tenner so I'm not complaining.

Oh, and yes, I run dualhead (two monitors on one PC). I might put a page up with some info about that at some point.

Sound Blaster Live! Player 1024

Cooling and casing

Globalwin FOP32 cooler, two Sunon 80mm case fans, and a Globalwin CAF12 120mm card cooler

My PC sounds like a small aircraft. I really have to build a baybus for this thing.

Globalwin 802 case

This is a really nice case for working in, although it's not the prettiest around. It will be, though, when I paint it...

Storage

IBM 7200rpm 20Gb HDD

Cheap from buy.com due to voucher scammage.

Asus 40x CD-ROM drive

A very fast drive, at least according to CD Speed. Cheap too.

Yamaha 24x8x4x SCSI CD recorder

Other bits

IWill SCSI card

CNet Pro 200WL 10/100 LAN card

OS

Debian GNU/Linux

(mixture of Woody and Sid)

Windows 2000

Just for gaming, these days. I do all my work and internet stuff in Linux.

My spare workstation. It's gradually getting turned into an mp3 player, when I can be arsed to fix the PSU (it's a bit broken). Consists of:

Core bits

Celeron 488 MHz

Abit ZM6 motherboard

128Mb PC100 RAM

Graphics and sound

Creative Labs TNT1

Philips Brilliance 15A

Sound Blaster PCI64

Cooling and casing

Globalwin FDP32 cooler, one case fan

Enlight 702 case

Storage

Maxtor 10.1Gb HDD

Creative Labs 32x CD-ROM

Other bits

Cheap D-Link PCI network card

This is the chip that has wrested the "best overclocker of our times" crown from the fabled Celeron 300 (@450, natch). It's basically a cut-down Thunderbird (ie the new "Performance Enhanced Athlon", or whatever stupid name AMD are calling it this week), with the 256kb of level 2 cache cut down to a measly 64kb. However, this doesn't have quite as large an effect on performance as you might think.

On top of that, the overclocking is just plain rude. Almost every Duron is capable of doing 900-950Mhz; not bad for a circa £80 chip. There are issues related to clock locking, however; AMD decided to lock the multipliers on some of the chips, so overclocking it involves either unlocking a processor or getting an unlocked one. I cheated and got a guaranteed chip from OCuk, which was expensive, but saved me some hassle.

Anyway, the upshot is a have a chip with performance roughly equivalent to a classic (slotted) Athlon 850 or 900, which can't be bad. In fact, I now play all my games at 1280x1024 as a minimum. Which is nice.

My Celeron

I didn't buy this chip to overclock it. It was a 433MHz when I bought it, and I knew I had a really good chance of getting 488MHz by going to a 75MHz bus. As I was putting together a low-cost machine anyway, I figured that was good enough.

I read a few reviews on the web, and they all said the same - that the 433s will do 488 but no higher. There was one guy who got 541, but only by using water cooling, and even then he had to keep use a few pounds of ice every hour to keep the water cold enough for the machine to be stable.

So, imagine my surprise when my chip did 541, straight out of the box, without even needing any voltage tweaking. It's not even in a fancy case; it's an Enlight jobby with a front fan and pretty good airflow, but then the room's generally pretty warm. My hardware monitoring reports the chip as running at 45degC, well within Intel's spec of 70degC.

Tragically, at this speed the PCI bus is running at 41MHz and it proved to be too much for the harddrive, which promptly started giving read errors. So, it's back at 488 now. Grrrrr.

Globalwin FDP32

This thing is really, really enormous. Unbelievably so. I should really get a digital camera and put a picture of it up.