On our retro series, I will talk about how to build the ultimate gaming computer, not this 2014 but for 2001 and below games. There are some very interesting marketing data on new PC purchases during that year, which shows that most PC upgrades for consumers are driven not by the grownups in the house but by the kids who want a more powerful gaming machine.
Certainly, there are no more demanding applications for computer than that time's graphics intensive games. So today, we are going to help you figure out how to put together the ultimate gaming computer (2001) and we are going to start out with graphics.
The hottest during this time is the GeForce 3 graphics card here and as a million cards out there. It is actually a new generation for 2001. The GeForce 3 is the latest generation graphics processor from NVidia. This video card actually includes a 57 million transistor or graphics processor. In a different perspective, that is more transistors than a Pentium 4 and a Pentium 3 put together.
That is just on the graphics processor. It has also 64 megabytes of 230 megahertz DDR Memory but what's key about this is it is programmable. For the first time, the graphics processor is as programmable as the CPU. It has an instruction set just as the Intel processors have instructions that you can program Microsoft Word for Windows with.
Once you have a killer graphics card in your computer, the next most important element for a great gaming machine is sound. There are many sound cards and systems out there to choose.
If you're sitting in a movie theater with really nice Dolby Digital or digital sound system and you're surrounded by sounds, this is really great immersion. You want to have the same experience on a PC, the problem on the PC during this time is most of the sound you hear in games are not positional or not great stereo sound.
The Philips Thunderbird Avenger chip of the Philips Acoustic Edge Sound Card was developed with many algorithms on it. It allows to take any stereo sound and create multi-channel sound, which is four or 5.1 channels of sound just like in the theater, even though the game itself is only pushing stereo sound or two track sound.
You can have the best graphics and sound cards in your computer but underneath that are you still have to be able to process the bits fast enough to drive everything, so how important is the speed of your CPU?
Your best option is the P4, the Pentium 4 obviously, and running at 1.7 gigahertz.
This post will be updated.
