Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Building an Extreme
System
In ThIs chaPTEr
In the first two editions of this topic, we built systems designed to provide top
performance for 3D games. We were planning on doing the same for this new
edition, until we talked with several friends who are heavily into gaming. They
all told us that, although gaming PCs are still used by many gamers, they are
rapidly declining in popularity, with most gamers shifting to gaming consoles.
Determining Functional Requirements
Hardware Design Criteria
Component Considerations
Building the Extreme System
Final Words
So, for this edition we decided that rather than building yet another dedicated
gaming system, we'd instead build an extreme system. An extreme system is
one in which one or more functions—processor and memory performance,
video performance, hard disk performance or capacity, noise level, and so
on—are optimized for top performance, sometimes at the expense of other
functions.
A gaming system is, of course, one form of extreme system, but there are others.
For gamers, 3D graphics performance is critical, but for some extreme systems
they don't matter much, if at all. Robert, for example, is doing increasingly
more video production, which can place extreme demands on a system. For
that purpose, processor performance and hard drive capacity and perfor-
mance are critical, but even integrated video is perfectly acceptable.
One of our correspondents provides an even more striking example of an un-
usual extreme system. He produces high-resolution CGI graphics videos as a
hobby(!), and he's built his own small render farm of several extreme systems
configured in a Beowulf cluster. Those systems run headless, so video is liter-
ally zero priority. They have small standard hard drives, are built in ordinary
mini-tower cases, and look like nothing special. But they're extreme systems,
all the same. Each has a high-performance processor and dual high-end vid-
eo adapters (which function as floating-point operations accelerators), and
each spends all its time rendering individual CGI frames. (When his wife com-
mented about how much he was spending on PC components, he told her
she should be thankful he hadn't bought a cabin cruiser, as one of their friends
had just done.)
We had to pick one extreme system configuration to build for this chapter,
and we figured we might as well make it actually useful to us, so we elected to
build an extreme video production and scientific number-crunching system
for Robert, one with a very powerful processor, fast memory, and a ton of hard
disk storage. Along the way, we'll point out alternatives you might choose to
configure your own extreme system for your own purposes.
