Sharky Extreme readers and PC enthusiasts alike have lived with the constant pressure to upgrade and boost the performance of their home PCs. From new CPUs that seem to be popping out of the oven at break neck speeds to video accelerator chips that are capable of leveling virtual mountains of polygons, the industry feeds off of our insatiable desire for more power.
If this circumstance is indeed true and we are to live up to our description, then it means that Sharky Extreme and its readers are constantly in a state of starvation for the next greatest "thing". It might be sad (for our bank balance anyway) but it's true.
So we've decided to assemble what we feel is the fastest gaming PC possible using the top parts currently resident in our lab. Read between the lines here that some of it might not be available to the end user right now. Because we run literally hundreds of benchmarks each week, selecting the components for this Godzilla (in the fire-breathing dragon sense, not the lumbering fellow in a rubber suit sense) PC was relatively easy.
Join us now, as we attempt to break our own benchmark land speed records with this special "Sharky's Machine" configuration. (Please folks, no references to Burt Reynolds, the original Sharky's Machine, ok? Leave that to our staff, who regularly make artwork out of bad puns.)
Even though your Biology 101 professor may have told you repeatedly that amino acids were the principal components for building proteins essential for the support of life, we would counter that notion with the fundamental need for a strong CPU for your PC instead.
Your system's CPU is the start, and often times the end, of your overall satisfaction level while using your PC. Get stuck with a CPU that's too slow or doesn't handle floating-point operations well, and you're in trouble.
Even a strong video accelerator can't save you if it's waiting for instructions or geometry setup routines from your PC's CPU.
Therefore, for the ultimate Sharky's Machine, we chose what is arguably the fastest x86 compatible CPU that has graced our test bench to date: the AMD Athlon 650.
Thanks to a pipelined and superscalar FPU, the Athlon 650 can handle up to three simultaneous floating point instructions per clock cycle. It also sports the fastest integer core speed level of any x86 CPU thus far, 650MHz.
Intel's Pentium III 600 CPU is a close runner up to the might of the Athlon 650 CPU, but for this PC we need the all-out fastest powerplant possible and the Athlon 650 is currently it.
Unfortunately the Athlon 650 is a bank budget killer on the level of an atomic tax bomb, clocking in at a mind blowing $900 each (estimated street price plus fan/heatsink). With the Athlon 650 set to arrive in OEM PCs by the end of this month, followed by its debut from component resellers two to four weeks after, it's also clear that you won't be dashing out to pick one up at the local A & P. But for the purposes of our experiment to create the fastest gaming PC possible, it's the best option to get the job done.