Kelvyn Taylor

Even after many years of building and testing PCs, some things still take me by surprise. A few weeks ago, I managed to destroy my motherboard by not taking care when plugging the 3GHz Pentium 4 Northwood CPU into its socket after a routine spring cleaning.

I actually thought I had destroyed the processor, since one of the pins had bent and shorted out a couple more, but a quick check showed it was still alive and well.

So, I had to find a new motherboard to replace the two-year-old Intel 845E-based model I had fried. The 845E was a short-lived oddball chipset that supported 400/533MHz front-side bus speed and DDR memory. It had done sterling service, with no failures or problems, and had pretty well all the features I thought I needed.

But now it was history, so I had to bite the bullet. Due to a limited budget, I ended up with a reasonably priced board based on the much more recent - but hardly cutting edge - Intel 875P (Canterwood) chipset.

This offers dual-channel DDR memory support, a Sata controller and IDE Raid capabilities, plus other useful goodies, such as Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire and multichannel integrated audio, yet still cost less than £85 including VAT.

After installing it, Windows XP presented me with the customary blue screen of death, so a repair install of XP was required. As an aside, if you do this use a slipstreamed XP installation CD that incorporates whatever service packs you have currently installed.

I used a Service Pack 1 slipstreamed CD on a system that had been updated to Service Pack 2, and it caused me no end of grief with components and drivers. To see how to create a slipstream CD, do a web search for the term. There are plenty of sites with information on the procedure.

Anyway, after the system was up and working and a few drivers reinstalled, I benchmarked it using the free Cinebench 2003 benchmark and found, to my surprise, that I had gained about 25-30 per cent extra performance from the CPU and Open GL tests, indicating there had been some significant processing and graphics bottlenecks in my old system.

Cinebench tests the performance of your CPU/memory subsystem and your graphics card, so the prime suspects on my old setup were the single-channel DDR266 memory controller and the 4X AGP graphics bus. I didn't change the memory or graphics card during the upgrade, but I had been using DDR333 memory and an 8X Geforce FX9600 Ultra AGP card all along, both of which were obviously running less than optimally.

Other benchmarks I ran told the same story, and my PC was noticeably more perky, particularly for graphics-intensive applications such as games, where my graphics card could now get data from the CPU as fast as it needed rather than being hamstrung by a 4X AGP interface.

I wasn't surprised to get some extra performance, but was very surprised at just how much extra I got. In the past when I've been making upgrade decisions, the motherboard is usually the last thing to go as I've never really viewed it as making as much difference as the more obvious components.

Yet I'd now argue that the first thing you change should be the motherboard; not only will you add extra capabilities, such as Sata support or Gigabit Ethernet, but you might save yourself forking out for a much more expensive CPU or graphics upgrade.

There comes a point when you have no choice but to upgrade the motherboard, for instance to accommodate newer CPU sockets or PCI Express cards. But I reckon it's worth the cost of an annual motherboard upgrade just to make sure you get the best possible use out of the other components that make up your PC.

My next major upgrade will be in 9-12 months, when we start to see Intel's first generation of multiple-core processors, such as the Smithfield dual-core desktop CPU. That's a development that really excites me, as I've always been a great fan of multiprocessor systems.

If you've never used a dual-processor PC, you should give it a try. If you've got a Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading you might have noticed an improvement in the responsiveness of your PC when running multiple tasks, but it's only a pale imitation of the real thing.

With software that's designed for multithreading - and an increasing number of new applications are - your system can really fly. It's hard to describe, but it's a bit like having a diesel car with massive amounts of torque: whatever you throw at it, it never bogs down.

At work I run half a dozen applications with several processor-intensive background tasks, such as virus protection and Seti@Home running, yet my humble four-year-old dual 1GHz Pentium III actually feels much more nippy than the home system I've described above. Yes, it's hopeless for gaming or video playback, but for normal office applications it's magnificent.

So I can't wait to get my hands on a two-way dual-core Smithfield system if such a beast ever appears, even if it's just for the satisfaction of opening up Task Manager and seeing four CPU graphs on display. Of course, the downside is that there will then be twice as many opportunities for me to break my motherboard.

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