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Subject: Hardware for computer chess

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 19:05:14 06/07/03


I'm am going to build a new machine for the purpose of (mainly) running computer
chess programs. What specs are important to computer chess programs?

Areas I'm pretty sure about (correct me if I'm wrong):

Processor speed - I think everyone agrees this is the major factor
RAM - I've heard people say that SDRAM is better, then DDR, the RDRAM, because
latency is more important than throughput.

Areas I'm not sure about:

Frontside bus speed - My first thought is that this isn't a major issue, because
it sounds like it only helps the throughput.
Cache - Is it better to spend the extra money to get the processors with larger
caches? Go for the 512/128KB, or is 256KB ok?
Hard drives - Does this matter outside of EGTBs?

The prices of Athlons seem to depend a lot on FSB and cache sizes, so if a
certain spec isn't very important to chess programs (ex. memory throughput), I
can save some money :)

Thanks for your help,
Russell



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