Hardware Introduction
The state in PC hardware never changed as quickly as it does today. What used to be top notch two months ago can today already be almost outdated. Keeping up with the pace is anything but easy, but I’ll try to give you some ideas what’s going on currently, what will be there in a few weeks and months and what I would advise you to buy right now.
CPU
As all of you are aware of, the CPU market in the PC industry is currently divided into the area of the CPUs for Socket 7 and CPUs for Slot 1.
Socket 7
Socket 7 CPUs are the soon disappearing Intel Pentium, its successor the Pentium w/MMX, the Cyrix/IBM 6x86MX and the AMD K6. The main differences between these CPUs is that while the Intel Pentium CPUs with or without MMX are the slowest CPUs for business applications, they are the fastest CPUs in applications with a lot of floating point calculations, particularly including 3D games, all compared to the its competitors at the same clock speed. The 6x86MX has the highest business application performance, particularly when looking at the real clock speed of the CPU, but it’s still lacking of decent FPU power, resulting in pretty bad 3D gaming performance. AMD’s K6 is somewhere in the middle between Intel and Cyrix, its business application performance isn’t quite as high as the 6x86MX, but its 3D gaming performance is a lot better than the 6x86MX.
Now Intel is ready to move out of the Socket 7 market completely, Cyrix and IBM have still not got a Socket 7 CPU with a more powerful FPU, so that the Socket 7 market is wide open for the K6 3D from AMD. This CPU will be probably be released in May. The special features of the K6 3D will be
- 100 MHz ‘front side bus’, which will increase the integer performance of the K6 significantly
- MMX like SIMD (single instruction multiple data) FP instructions, however only single precision as opposed to Intel’s upcoming MMX2 for the ‘Katmai’, which will offer SIMD FP instruction with double precision.
By coming out with both of these two features in one go, AMD’s K6 3D will not only get very close to Intel’s Pentium II in business application performance, but the special 3D features will in most cases offer equal or even better 3D gaming performance than the Pentium II. Two things have to be considered however, the K6 3D will hardly perform much better than the K6 in classical FP intensive applications as e.g. CAD applications and the 3D features of the K6 3D have to be used by the API or the game directly. Microsoft’s DirectX6 is supposed to include the 3D features of the K6 3D and AMD says that they will ship a special OpenGL driver for the K6 as well, so that Quake2 will also be able to benefit from the K6 3D.
The main problems of AMD are
- time to market. Intel will do a major product launch on April 15, including high end (Pentium II w/100 MHz front side bus) as well as low end (‘Celeron’ CPU) processor products, ready to destroy all of its competitors.
- shipping in volume. AMD is not exactly famous for fulfilling their promises in regards of satisfying the demand for their products. It took months after the launch until people could buy K6 233 CPUs last year and even today you can only get a K6 266 when you buy an OEM product, there are simply not enough K6 266 CPUs to sell them in retail.
Slot 1
The Slot 1 market used to host only one type of CPU so far, the Intel Pentium II. The current top Pentium II CPU runs at 333 MHz clock and is faster than any competitor in the PC market. For top notch business as well as 3D application performance as well as special software as photo editing, CAD and such the Pentium II still offers the best performance. In a little bit more than two weeks Intel will unveil the new 440BX chipset and with it the Pentium II CPUs with 100 MHz front side bus. Although the performance of the new BX 100 MHz systems won’t be too much different to the older LX 66 MHz systems in most applications, there will be still an increase in performance due to the new Pentium II CPUs with higher clock speed, as 350 and 400 MHz.
While Intel definitely wants to leave the Socket 7 market, it still doesn’t want to give away market share in the lower end area. Hence there will be another new CPU launched on April 15, the ‘Celeron’ CPU. This CPU is nothing but a Pentium II core without any L2 cache at a considerably low price. The performance expectations of this CPU are less than of a Pentium MMX 233 in business applications, but the FPU performance of the Pentium II core is considerably better than of a Pentium or Pentium w/MMX, so that I expect a 3D gaming performance which is better than what a Pentium MMX 233 can offer. This is a pretty important thing, because so far the Pentium MMX 233 offered the highest 3D gaming performance in the Socket 7 field, and although Celeron is Slot 1 rather than Socket 7, its price point is pretty close to current Socket 7 systems, which could make the Celeron a very interesting CPU for 3D gamers, who can’t afford a Pentium II system right now. Adding a few words to ‘Celeron’, it is supposed to be used on motherboards with the also new ‘440EX’ chipset, a stripped down version of the LX chipset, including AGP, but supporting only 3 PCI slots, only single CPU and missing a few more bits of the LX chipset as well. Nothing should really keep you from plugging your Celeron in an LX board, but Intel tries to avoid this by having different mounting devices for the Celeron, a problem that maybe sorted out by the motherboard manufacturers.
Slot 2
Looking a couple of more months down the road and into June/July this year, we can expect Intel’s new Slot 2 CPUs to be launched. These CPUs include a L2 cache that runs at CPU clock speed, the cartridge these CPUs come in is huge, easily double the height of current Pentium II SECs. The Slot 2 CPUs will offer an amazing performance increase over Slot1, but they will be targeted only to the high end market like servers and high end workstations. The main chipset for these high end CPUs will be the 450NX chipset and you can see how strong Intel believes in the high end nature of this product when asking Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers about Slot 2 boards. Most of these motherboard manufacturers won’t even make these boards, because they say that they haven’t got the right kind of customers for these products. It’s interesting though, that Slot 2 CPUs will also work with the BX chipset. Slot 2 will only come with 100 MHz front side bus.
Slot M
‘Slot M’ will be the name for what you plug Intel’s upcoming ‘Merced’ CPU into. This IA64 CPU is supposed to change everything in the PC market, but since it is at least 12 months down the line I’ll restrain form commenting on it any further.
Recommendation
As usual it depends very much on what you will need the system for and how much money you want to spend.
- For office applications only, the Cyrix/IBM 6x86MX offers outstanding price/performance. The upcoming 6x86MX version running at 250/83 MHz or future 6x86MX CPUs with 100 MHz front side bus will offer office application performance as high as high end Pentium II CPUs. However, if you need the system for CAD or if you fancy playing 3D games a lot, the 6x86MX should certainly not be your first, not even your second choice.
- People that haven’t got that much money to spend and who run a lot of office applications but also like playing 3D games can choose between the AMD K6, which offers very good price/office performance or Intel’s Pentium MMX, which is more expensive, less powerful in office applications but faster than the others in 3D games.
- If you simply want the fastest, if you are CAD designer, do a lot DTP or are a crazy 3D gamer, you should seriously consider Intel’s Pentium II CPU. It’s the most expensive but also the most powerful CPU for PCs currently on the market and it offers pretty good allround abilities.
- On April 15 things will change a little, Intel’s new Celeron CPU could become a very interesting alternative for 3D gamers and people with little money to spend can for the first time afford a Slot 1 system. However, Celeron is certainly the wrong CPU for people who mainly need office application performance … the 6x86MX will be definitely the better alternative here.
- In May things will change again, because AMD will unveil its K6 3D CPU. This CPU will offer very good office application power as well as very good 3D gaming performance. People who don’t like buying Intel products should wait until then, unless they don’t believe in AMD’s ability to not only announce but also ship products anymore.
I think it’s still too early to discuss ‘Katmai’ or any other CPUs expected more than 9 months from now.
Motherboard
After making your mind up for which CPU you’re going to use you will need to make the right choice for a motherboard.
There’s a lot of motion in the Socket 7 motherboard market, mainly because Intel is moving away from it. Intel’s latest and final Socket 7 chipset, the 430TX chipset was launched in the beginning of last year and it’s certainly miles away from being latest technology anymore. It does not offer AGP and it’s limited to 64 MB of cacheable area, considerably limiting the improvement of a larger amount of system memory than 64 MB. Intel told us that AGP is the future and although AGP does not offer any significant performance improvement in any application, not even 3D gaming, you should still consider a Socket 7 AGP board rather than a Socket 7 board without this feature. This means going for a non-Intel chipset. Currently there are motherboards with VIA’s Apollo VP3 and SiS’ 5591/92 chipset available that offer AGP, but while the VIA VP3 chipset is officially limited to only 66 MHz front side bus, the SiS 5591/92 may or may not support 100 MHz front side bus. In the next months we can expect 100 MHz front side bus motherboards that can carry the AMD K6 3D and these motherboards will either carry VIA’s new Apollo MVP3 or ALI’s Aladdin V chipset. As already said, SiS may either support 100 MHz with their 5591/92 chipset or there may be a new chipset for this particular bus speed.
The main problem in the Socket 7 motherboard market is that you have to go for a non-Intel chipset, resulting in sloppiness of the Taiwanese chipset manufacturers, which you would never come across with a product from Intel. This may sound harsh, but the 100 MHz Socket 7 motherboards I have tested so far were nothing but a big disappointment, I never came across so may failures, instabilities and crashes ever before. Intel maybe disliked for a lot of its business practices, but you can say what you want, Intel would have never dared sending me as immature products as I received recently. Hence we can only hope that the non-Intel chipset manufacturers as well as the board makers will finally get their act together and learn a bit from Intel’s professionalism, so that there will indeed be the wonderful ‘Super7’ platform for the K6 3D, proclaimed by AMD last year at Microprocessor Forum.
There’s a lot more happening on the Slot 1 motherboard side. On April 15 Intel will launch their 440BX chipset, the first shipping chipset that runs at 100 MHz front side bus. These boards are supposed to host Pentium II 350 and 400 MHz CPU, also launched on the same day. As already mentioned, the 100 MHz front side bus will not make as much of a difference as it will make in Socket 7 systems, simply because the L2 cache clock is de-coupled from the front side bus and hence still running at half of the CPU clock speed in Slot 1 systems. Nevertheless can we definitely expect new performance heights for the 350 and 400 MHz Pentium II systems then.
Intel will also launch the 440EX chipset, a cheap version of the 440LX chipset, known as the first AGP chipset ever. The EX will still run at 66 MHz front side bus and is supposed to host the new ‘Celeron’ Slot 1 CPU. EX motherboards will be cheaper than LX motherboards, but in Q3 there’ll be only a $6 difference between the LX and EX chipset, so that you may as well go with the fully featured LX chipset rather than the castrated EX version even when only using a Celeron.
Recommendation
I don’t want to recommend any particular product here, this shall be done in a new motherboard review coming up soon. However do I want to give my advice on what kind of motherboard to use. If you should be into the Pentium II then please don’t think that LX boards will be completely old news once BX is out. The 100 MHz bus won’t buy you that much, so that I expect that LX will stay around for quite a while this year. The new 100 MHz Pentium II CPUs will also be considerably more expensive than its 66 MHz predecessors and a Pentium II 333 will be almost as fast as a Pentium II 350, but quite a bit cheaper. On the Socket 7 side I would recommend to wait until some decent 100 MHz boards are available. We still don’t know when the K6 3D will ship in volume and it’s also not quite clear when Cyrix/IBM will come up with a 100 MHz front side bus CPU. Going for a 66 MHz Socket 7 AGP board now may not be the smartest move, because these boards will soon be old news. The performance difference between 66 and 100 MHz front side bus in Socket 7 systems will be very impressive, so that you may even want to consider running your old 66 MHz CPU at 100 MHz if you can, because you will gain a lot … opposed to the situation in Slot 1.
Graphics Cards
This is certainly the sector in the PC business where there’s most motion currently. The range of products is very big and there are upcoming new products already on the horizon. Hence it’s of major importance to know what you really want, unless you want to face a disappointment.
AGP or PCI ?
I’ve already said loads about this topic, but since the marketing hype is big in this area, I won’t hesitate repeating myself. AGP was supposed to give us faster and better graphics, particularly 3D graphics. Running games today, 6 months after AGP was released, doesn’t show you any or hardly any difference between AGP or PCI based graphical sub-systems. The major advantage of AGP is the higher data transfer bandwidth, but that means it only kicks in when actual data is transferred. So far I have yet to see a game that convinces me, G-Police puts me to sleep and Incoming looks and plays the same on PCI or AGP systems. If you should be wondering about 2D performance then please forget AGP completely. I have still not found any significant difference in 2D performance between PCI or AGP systems and I doubt that I ever will. Hence AGP is fine, it’s nice, it’s latest technology, buy it as long as it’s the same price as PCI, but don’t become depressive if you should still be using a PCI card. For all the ones who don’t believe me but prefer marketing hype … why do you think that the fastest 3D accelerator currently (the 3Dfx Voodoo2) is using PCI? It’s faster than any AGP 3D accelerator.
Graphic Chips – Now and Soon
I will now list all current and the soon upcoming 3D or 2D/3D graphic accelerator chips and give you my personal opinion on it.
3Dfx Voodoo
Although Voodoo isn’t top notch anymore, this chipset still runs most games wonderfully, fast and there’s many games around that support the special 3Dfx Glide engine. The Voodoo made some history in the 3D arena, it stayed the best 3D accelerator chip for more than 12 months, making card manufacturers very happy, because they didn’t have to lower the price of their Voodoo cards for almost 12 months either. Since Voodoo2 is out, the price of Voodoo cards will drop considerably, so if you want great gaming experience at low price then go and grab a card with this chip.
3Dfx Voodoo Rush
The Rush was never a really convincing solution, designed as a chip that will run on 2D/3D boards. The 3D performance was always quite a bit behind Voodoo and the 2D performance of other cards was also better than the AT3D chip used with Voodoo Rush. Cards with this chip had its niche as cheap 2D/3D solution with some Voodoo performance, but now these cards are definitely outdated. I wouldn’t see any sensible reason for buying a Voodoo Rush based card anymore, unless it’s extremely cheap.
3Dfx Voodoo2
The Voodoo2 is currently as good as you can get in terms of 3D gaming experience. Get one card or even two in SLI configuration and you’ll be a very happy gamers. I don’t think I have to say more about this chip, you will find several pages on my website that cover this new leader of the pack. Only one thing is worth mentioning, I doubt that the Voodoo2 will have much of a chance to stay performance leader as long as Voodoo did.
3DLabs Permedia 2
The Permedia 2 was designed as a low end OpenGL solution with some decent 3D gaming performance and good 2D opposed to 3DLabs high end OpenGL Glint chips. The 2D performance is very good and the performance in professional OpenGL application is not matched by any other mainstream graphic chip. 3D gaming experience however is not exactly amazing, so that you may want to team it up with a Voodoo or Voodoo2 board. Buy cards with this chip if you want good office performance and if you use OpenGL applications as well, don’t expect a lot of gaming excitement from it though.
ATI Rage Pro, Rage Pro Turbo
The Rage Pro is a 2D/3D accelerator with good to very good 2D performance and questionable 3D performance. The problems with its 3D performance are mainly compatibility … lots of games don’t look very good on the Rage Pro, but some do and they play well too. ATI has only recently released an OpenGL ICD, but Quake2 doesn’t only look horrible on it, it also runs horribly slow. Unless the final version is considerably better, Quake2 and alike won’t be the right games for the Rage Pro. This chip is used a lot on motherboards and as already said it offers good 2D performance even in true color, but the 3D part is certainly not the particularly attractive for gamers. Get cards with that chip only if you are a religious believer in ATI or if you can get it pretty cheap.
Intel i740
The i740 was designed a long while back as kick ass 2D/3D solution, but until it finally came to market it couldn’t really amaze anybody anymore, except a few people who ran some unrealistically benchmarks. What I like about the i740 is its very good 3D image quality and its decent 2D performance. However, its 3D gaming performance in terms of frame rates is not really that amazing, leaving it behind well known chips like NVIDIA’s RIVA 128 and 3Dfx Voodoo2. However as a cost effective solution and used in complex games as e.g. Incoming from Rage you will still be quite satisfied with its 3D performance. I’ve seen the new OpenGL ICD and I must say that Quake 2 looks beautiful … however it currently runs at only 25-35 fps, not good enough for multiplayer cracks (as me). I recommend cards with this chip to everyone who is not pleased with NVIDIA’s RIVA chip in terms of image quality but who can live with lower frame rates. It’s a very tough competitor to Rendition’s V2x00 chips.
NVIDIA RIVA 128
The RIVA 128 has until recently be the chip with the most brute 3D force in Direct3D, but it was always somewhat lacking in 3D image quality. It’s 2D performance is good, however worse than ATI’s Rage Pro and 3DLabs’ Permedia 2, especially in true color, the i740 is about as fast as the RIVA in 2D. As all-round solution the RIVA 128 is still a very good bet, since the beta OpenGL ICD is out you can even play Quake2, especially on Pentium II systems, but it simply doesn’t look as good as the i740, the Voodoo, Voodoo Rush, Voodoo2 and Verite 2×00. The chip is lacking a support of more than 4 MB local RAM, so that 800×600 is the highest 3D gaming resolution offered by the RIVA 128. Go for a card with this chip if you want to experience smooth 3D gaming but you’ll have to live with some minor flaws in image quality.
NVIDIA RIVA ZX
This recently announced younger brother of the RIVA 128 can now support up to 8 MB local RAM and it comes with some improved features for DVD and video in/out. Nevertheless is it still based on the RIVA 128, which means that it won’t be much faster than RIVA 128 and the image quality will also not be different to what the RIVA 128 is offering you.
NVIDIA TNT
This new announced next generation NVIDIA chip will be a lot different to the RIVA 128. It offers great pixel fill rate and polygon rate, enabling multipass rendering as Voodoo2, using per pixel mip mapping and full scene anti-aliasing for very good image quality. The row data from the press release looks as if it could become a Voodoo2 killer, but I think we better wait until we’ve seen first silicon running. In any way, this chip will be a major improvement over RIVA 128 and will probably ensure NVIDIA’s lead in the main stream 2D/3D accelerator market.
Matrox Productiva G100
The G100, code name ‘Twister’, will be Matrox new mid range 2D/3D solution. Whilst it’s supposed to offer best 2D performance, its 3D performance will not be able to compete with RIVA 128. The first Productiva cards are supposed to ship April 98 for a very low price.
Matrox G200
The G200 is called ‘no-compromise chip for high performance users’ from Matrox itself and it shall offer top notch 2D performance and close to Voodoo2 3D performance. The 3D features list is long, although not as long as Videologic’s PVRSG features list. The G200 will also support a long list of add-on features like video MPEG compression and more. All in all this chip sounds very promising and may be Matrox’ way back into the graphics scene. I will test a G200 board in a weeks time.
Rendition Verite 2×00
The V2x00 could not really convince too many graphic card manufacturers, although it offers beautiful 3D image quality. It lacks good scalability over Pentium II systems, hence not offering high frame rates in fast systems and its 2D performance is pretty poor or at least the worst in the field of current 2D/3D accelerators. Cards with V2x00 are interesting for owners of Socket 7 systems who don’t care much about 2D performance. If you buy one you’ll be rewarded with excellent 3D image quality.
Videologic PowerVR
The PowerVR with it’s pretty unique ‘infinite planes’ technology impressed a lot of people when it came out. However, as a 3D only solution it could never really compete with 3Dfx’ Voodoo neither in terms of speed nor in terms of image quality or compatibility. If you want to buy a cheap 3D add-on solution you better have an eye out for price drops of Voodoo cards and leave this card alone.
Videologic PVRSG or PVRNG (PowerVR second or next generation)
As my personal CeBIT 98 highlight, the PVRSG has impressed me a lot and this seems to have upset a lot of people. I know that the real hardcore gamers weren’t fans of the old PowerVR, but now nobody seems to realize that this new product from Videologic is as excellent as it is. For the PC sector there will be three different chips, a midrange 2D/3D solution, a high end 3D only solution and a high end 2D/3D solution. All of these chips will offer an amazing 3D performance, including real hardware bump mapping without any performance hit, bilinear filtering with 1 clock cycle cost, tri-linear 2 cycles, anisotropic 4 cycles, full scene anti-aliasing and pretty much everything DirectX6 will support. From what I’ve seen now, I think the PVRSG will kick some serious butt, especially 3Dfx Voodoo2 as well as NVIDIA’s TNT. The PVRSG will most likely be very fast, offering the highest image quality available.
Recommendation
I only want to recommend what I would buy myself here this time, because I’ve already given my opinion on each chip in the text above. I think that for people who want top notch quality and performance there is no doubt that they currently have to go Voodoo2 for 3D and for 2D there are two options. Either you want to have best picture quality on a high end 21 or 24″ monitor, then you won’t have much of a choice besides Matrox’ Millennium II. Maybe you can live with some picture quality flaws but need OpenGL acceleration, then go for a card with 3DLab’s Permedia 2. All other solutions are somewhere in between and hence not feasible for myself. It could look a lot different for yourself though, e.g. a 17″ monitor makes the whole thing already a lot different.
The future could look a lot different. Maybe Videologic’s high end 2D/3D solution is already enough to make everyone happy. It could be the Matrox G200 and Voodoo2 or PVRSG high end 3D only as well. Last but not least will we have to see how NVIDIA’s TNT will score.
