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Subject: Re: How would this cut it as a Chess PC?

Author: Frank Wies

Date: 09:44:59 01/27/06

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On January 27, 2006 at 10:16:02, Ted Summers wrote:

>Gateway Model GT5034
>AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
>
>www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7623896&type=product&productCategoryId=pcmcat60700050019&id=1130986103611

There are some things you should consider. First, what is the speed of the
memory. If it is not DDR400 or PC 3200 it will gate the performance of the CPU.

The hard drive should be spinning at least 7200 RPM and if possible have 8M
Cache for faster tablebase transfers during endgames. The Western Digital Raptor
is spinning at 10K and has the best data transfer rate available.

Get the best video card that you can afford. A high end video card offloads the
CPU to tend to more important matters :-)

If you can spend more for the CPU and the other hardware related issues are
resoloved, it will future proof you for a few months.

The last thing to mention is that DDR2 533 will be in high volume production
this year. The same Athlon CPU with the DDR2 533 may improve performance by
as much as 30% with no other changes, so you may want to wait until that
transition takes place.

Hope that this helps.
Frank



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