Now for the Gigabyte Motherboard: The GA-71X is a pretty good motherboard but it's nothing to brag about. It was one of the first batch of Athlon motherboards on the market. Gigabyte built this design using the AMD Fester motherboard reference design (which unfortunately is responsible for the poor placing of the power connector on all but the earliest revisions of the Asus K7M and the Freeway Athlon motherboard. None of which is available for sale in the United States). Gigabyte built it as an OEM board and it shows: 1 AGP, 5 PCI, and 2 ISA slots, an Ultra-DMA-66 IDE controller and has 3 DIMM slots for PC-100 memory. Utilizing the venerable AMD-750 "Irongate" chipset, it can scale with processors up to 1GHz. It is also jumperless has no tweaking options in the bios. The downside to this is that this board has no overclocking capabilities whatsoever. You are going to have to find one of those "gold finger" devices or solder your chip if you want to overclock it. Another downside to this board is that it is limited by it's chipset--the AMD 750 chipset it does not have support for AGP 4X or a 133MHz bus. In order to get features such as those you'll have to wait until you can get a motherboard based on the Via KX-133 chipset or if you want even more performance, you can wait for the AMD-760 chipset. 

All in all this is a rather bland OEM board. But I wouldn't penalize it just yet: it's a first generation board so it's not going to have all of the bells and whistles that the fully matured Intel 440 BX chipset boards do. But at least it is built rock solid and works well with the hardware I have. I'd recommend that any prospective Athlon buyer take a hard look at this motherboard this holiday season.

I chose the NEC E700. It's a 17" monitor that has a crystal-clear image and outputs beautiful color. Although this monitor does not come from the most expensive monitor class that NEC makes (FP Graphics Professional), this will still beat nine out of every ten monitors that you can compare it to. If you were in the market for a new color monitor, I'd highly suggest something from NEC or Sony.

For those of you looking to pick up a new video card for your system, I'd take a long, hard look at this card.

It can make some pretty mean 320X240 videos if you got a power processor--but make sure you have one monster hard disk because video capture consumes disk space at frightening speeds. An uncompressed 30 second 320X240 movie is over 200MB!! 

It has gold plated connectors, is EAX -compliant, and has 1024 midi voices, plus it comes with an elaborate software package that is also easily updated on Creative Lab's website. 

The down side is that it comes at a high price--and a hefty one at that. You'll need $300 to take this home. Luckily I got it for only half that since I was at the CES show. Don't ya love show specials?

I'll probably be holding onto this thing until I get a DVD drive, but that won't be any time soon since there isn't much DVD-based software, plus why couldn't my CD-ROM co-exist with my DVD-ROM anyways?

Well that is not entirely true anymore: with the MC-1000SE Upgrade Kit you can change the postion of your fans to make way for cramped areas. Even the world-renowned Asus K7M can even fit this titan-sized cooler. A second upgrade I got is the the MC-1500 cache cooler. This new device has a .17" thick copper plate that can help spread the cooling power comming off the peltier to your cache chips. The third and final upgrade I got (which is not sold by Swiftech) is the copper core spacer from TiGeR. WIth that I can further lower the temperature of my CPU by another 7 degrees C.

But in it's finished form, this isn't your grandma's cooler--it costs $200 with all the upgrades that I got, and it'll tear any other fan/heatsink-based cooler to shreds. It's got two 33CFM blowers running at 6850RPM and a 40X40MM 72-Watt Peltier. This beast of a cooler consumes power like there's no tomorrow: It eats juice at a staggering 12V/6 amps--you can run a vacuum cleaner with that much power. But because of that, you aren't going to run this thing without a second power supply, so I got myself a 2nd 300-watt bad boy to drive this cooler at temperatures that range between -12C/10.4F and 12C/53.6F. 

The only cooler that's more powerful than this is the MC-1000's big brother, the MC-2001 or if you want to go the insane method for total cooling freaks--water cooling with peltiers or by using refrigerators. 
 

The only down side to using this fancy cooling kit is that the fan eats one of your PCI slots. But then again a lot of motherboards are shipping with AMR slots which are placed next to the AGP slot. And since there aren't any cards out there that use an AMR slot--who cares if you can't use it anymore! Enjoy your video cooling kit.