best gaming pc of 2004

okay 130 to 90 nanometre scale I will give you the benefit of the doubt with it, if we go bleeding edge we are looking at the 90 nanometer stuff if not we are looking at the 130 nanometer stuff

 

90nm was available in late 2004 for AMD CPUs, but the high-end (FX) CPUs were 130 until 2005.
Intel had hyperthreaded 90nm Pentium 4s in 2004, but only 32-bit. 64-bit were also 130nm until 2005. Also performed worse than AMD, so if you were building a high-end PC you'd go with a 130nm CPU.

 

Right, so what will we go for AMD or Intel?

 

AMD. NetBust had high clocks but shit IPC. Pretty sure the Athlon 64 FX-55 was the most powerful CPU in 2004.

 

Okay what about Graphics cards then?

 

Something Socket A for sure.

The Athlon 3200+ was one of the fastest CPUs money could buy at the time. But, this is honestly a wasted exercise, I'm currently doing a very similar project and it's a nightmare to find anything that'll actually run on it.

 

Hm 2004 was.. 12 years ago already. Wow! Back then the "best" I could "build" was my little 800mhz rig that was running Windows XP. Ah, the memories.

 

What about Graphics cards then I am definitely thinking ATI here...
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Tell me about it, 10 years ago with £2k I built a dual core computer with a stupidly heavy case and called it "Stealth" and 10 years later with £2300 I built a 5960X powered computer called it "The Magnum Opus" shows you what 10 years can make
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Okay lets get back on track....

 

Wat
Socket 939 was released in 2004, you could get dual core Athlon 64 FX CPUs. The 3200+ is far from the best you could get.

Also socket A is like 1999-2002, was entirely obsolete by 2004. Replaced by 754.

 

It seems the Ultra-high-end-GPU-segment was made by the GeForce 6800 Ultra and the Radeon X800 XT PE. My source is http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/2004-27gpu2_43.html#sect0.

 

What about hard drives?

 

Samsung HD300LJ, 7200 RPM, 300GB, 8MB cache, maximum speed 53,9Mb/s.

 

What about 4 of them, 2 striped and 1 redundant and the other for OS?

 

I don't think anyone aside from my dad would have really needed 1.2TB of storage back then, but I guess you could do that. Also, why 300GB for Windows XP? I don't think you would've needed that much.

 

What about gaming? The striped drives are for the games

 

In 2005 (close enough) we had a desktop built on average specs. It had a 1.1 GHz Dual Core, AMD, 1GB of RAM, Integrated Graphics, 300 W power supply, Windows XP. 100GB HDD Yeah, it wasn't fast even when we got it. Its fate was overheating (after 2 years of daily use); our computer actually started on fire. Scary memory.

Also, we had dial-up at the time...yuck

 

Did you need 600GB worth of hard drives for your games in 2006? You can do it, but I don't know if you'd need that.

And we're gonna let it burn, burn, burn. We're gonna let it burn, burn, burn. We're gonna....
Sorry, just seemed awkward. 1GB of RAM is hardly imaginable to me though. Right now my computer draws 2.4GB with just Chrome open, Windows 10 isn't very nice to RAM apparently.

 

1GB was pretty good. At the time, hardware heavy web browsing wasn't a big thing for me. It worked well for playing cheap walmart games on.

 

Yeah, times changed about what software needed. At least it pays off.

 

The Athlon XP 3200+ was released for Socket A on May 13, 2003 and only scores 6 points lower in PassMark than the Athlon 64 FX-51. It can be found for slightly cheaper and was the fastest CPU ever released for Socket A. It's still a very viable option, especially if you're a 32-bit purest. Windows XP 64-bit wasn't released until 2005, and most DDR motherboards don't support more than 4 GB of RAM anyway. 64-bit was practically useless for home-application in 2004.