Introduction

Performance...need we say anything else to an enthusiast. We all want it but unfortunately 90% or more of us cannot afford it. What a performance PC may be one week, won't be next week. In the ever growing world of PC hardware, you just can't afford to constantly have the fastest PC. Though, we must say that if it wasn't for all this hardware being released, this website wouldn't exist, and I would be playing Frogger on my XT again - No! Not Radeon XT but the beloved 086 11MHz (with the turbo button on) XT.

In front of me right now I have what would be classed by many as the fastest desktop system money could buy. At the time of writing, the system includes the fastest equipment available and by the time we go live, we have our fingers crossed that it will stay this way. :)

The role of a Technical Writer, my job here at TweakTown, is fantastic as you really get a chance to get down and dirty with some of the latest hardware. There is no denying it; technical writers for large tech sites do get to a point where they begin not to appreciate brand spankin' new hardware since you become very much accustomed to it as a regular thing from day to day. For example: Bob from x.com just got another high-powered Radeon 9800 Pro VGA card to review. Most people would sell a lung for one of these puppies but our old mate Bob just scored another one and gracefully chucks it aside like you would a 4MB 3DFX Voodoo graphics card nowadays.

Occasionally something big happens in the industry, like the release of the first mainstream desktop 64-bit processor, and the spark comes back and you look forward to testing, testing and more testing. Today we have all the bad boys in the hardware market in-house and put together combing to produce a high-performance PC and then put it to the test in our usual set of benchmarks. The items include one of the fastest Radeon 9800 XT kindly donated by GeCube in Taiwan thanks to our friends at Kingmax, one of the nicest Athlon 64 motherboards available, the ABIT KV8-MAX3 based on the VIA K8T800 chipset provided by our friends at Altech Computers and finally the sucker powering it all - the brand new AMD Athlon 64 3200+, supplied not by AMD but by some friends of ours at a Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer.

We can feel the heat, and so should you - in true TweakTown style, let's move on and see the parts which make up the fastest (unoverclocked) desktop PC's today!

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