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| MEMORY |
Well now,
here's a piece of hardware that is near endless in options. To the
beginner, memory can be one of the hardest parts to understand. The
motherboard has a KT333 chipset and will allow for a ram bus speed
of 333MHz. He opted to go with PC3200 which is capable of 400MHz.
Lets just say that this is marketing hype for right now. It's very
important to pick a quality component here and make sure it's up to
JEDEC specs. This means that anything over PC2700 is a given that
it's not manufactured to JEDEC specs as they don't have specs for
anything over PC2700.
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| VIDEO
CARD |
Video
on a computer can range from a simple on-board solution to a high-end
piece by ATI, Nvidia, Matrox or 3DLabs. The best card out at the moment
is the Nvidia Ti4600 but the ATI 9700 is right around the corner followed
by a whole slew of new cards from the other manufacturers. The solution
here was a mix of performance vs. $$$. You can't get more performance
for the money than the Ti4200. The board he chose was a bit more expensive
than other 4200's due to the PCB board. I can tell you that this is
the prettiest video card I've ever seen. The manufacturer claims it
helps in a few ways that we'll cover later on in a different piece.
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| OPTICAL
DRIVES |
Well it
would be pretty difficult to get a system up and running without some
type of an optical drive. On this implementation he chose to go with
the Lite-On 16x48 DVD-ROM and the brand spanking new Lite-On 48x Burner.
This puppy is so new that there is not even a review as of the time
I'm writing this. Lite-On used to be a major OEM provider and stepped
into retail a couple years back. Its popularity soared with the release
of their 32 speed. It was on the Best of the Best list for MaximumPC
for quite a few months. It even stayed up after the release of many
40x speed burners. It was dethroned just this month by the TDK 40.
I'm sure that they'll be back on top shortly with this new release.
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Next
> Step 1
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