Making a cheap Doom III rig in Singapore

WHEN I WAS researching cheap Doom III rigs for the UK and USA, I first looked for the cheapest Geforce 6800 video card around. I got one at Cybermind and for sure it was very surprising to see one of those return-from-tomb appearance. Elsa has a Geforce 6800 in its wing. The Gladiac 940 is by far the cheapest plain vanilla 6800 in Singapore at S$599, around £170+VAT. Core speed is 325MHz and memory clock, 700MHz. It features an impressive copper heat sink fan which unlike some competitors cover the GPU and the memory. One can expect some good overclocking scores. There was no trace of this card in UK. If anyone can tell me whether they are on sale in UK, iut would be nice. Too bad also that no one on the web has tested this baby. In fact, it seems that Elsa has been deserted by most hardware reviewers despite being one of the better brands one or two years back... Remember the Quadro or the Gloria range... Also before I forget, it would be a good idea to compare ATI and Nvidia's latest stablemates in professional benchmarks like 3Dstudio or Maya...

Bell provides w the cheapest Athlon64 bundle. The Abit KV8pro bundled with an Athlon 64 2800+ costs only S$515. The board is pretty impressive on its own. With the K8T800Pro chipset, performance is pushed beyond the SIS755. With a Gigabit LAN, 5.1 Optical SPDIF I/O, 6 channel Analog Audio, Serial ATA150 RAID and support for eight USB 2.0 ports, there is nothing more to be asked. Two DIMM slots are present as well as five PCI slots. Of course, it comes with Abit patented µGuru™ Technology which helps the novice geeker overclock its machine more easily. However, we strongly recommend that you update to the latest BIOS to get the best of that card. The latest one supports CPU multiplier adjustable and allow the CPU FSB to be increased to 336MHz. The Athlon 64 2800+ replaces the Sempron 3100+ and is slightly quicker than than latter in DOOM III. It shares most features of its elder brothers except for the cache memory. The bundle also comes boxed with a fan..

For memory, we'll take two Crucial 512MB PC3200 CL3 DDR for S$278 at videopro and hopefully we'll get some overclocking out of it. Hard disk chosen is an ATA133 80GB Western Digital with 2MB cache and running at 7200rpm for S$99 at hardwareplace. Nothing special about it. We return to Cybermind for a TDK 12x Dual standard DVD Writer at S$119. Very attractive price for a quite attractive product. The floppy is courtesy of Samsung via Videopro at S$12..

Most people know Gainward for its video cards. What about Gainward as a sound card manufacturer? The Hollywood@home may be damn cheap at S$55 at Cybermind but it features some very impressive features for the price. It features VIA's Envy24 sound chip which allow sample rates of 192KHz and up to eight channels and digital output. Couple it with the equally hear-boggling Creative Inspire 7.1 T7700 speaker at S$249 at Videopro and your neighbours might even appreciate your ability to haul rockets at Zombies..

Another Creative Labs product to feature here is the Wireless 6000 optical desktop. It features a wireless keyboard and a wireless optical mouse. It is compatible with left and right handed persons and offers customizable buttons and endhanced F-key functionality. Not a bad deal for a brand name at S$59 form Cybermind.

To end up, the cheapest large monitor found was at Cybermind. The AOC 9Klr is silver black and pure flat and on sale at S$309. Cheap enough for us. It offers up to 18" viewable image size and accepts a maximum resolution of 1600x1200. A good product to catch aliens on. As for the casing.. I am still looking for a cheap casing in Singapore with a 400W+ power supply. Anyone knows where I can find them? The cheapest casing I could get, without a PSU was S$88.

Total price is S$2294 and excludes the price of a casing. While being very much attune to the latest technology, Singapore lacks a market the size of America or UK to bring a vibrant second hand market to life. Tomorrow, we'll see what France has to offer us. µ