The History of a Dream: How the Ultimate PC Has Evolved In 15 Years

Posted 07/29/2010 at 11:14am | by Gordon Mah Ung and Alex Castle

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Video Card

Old timers will wistfully recall the late 1990s when the pathetic amount of graphics cards frame buffer sizes led to such ideas as Intel’s direct memory execute which was implemented in many AGP cards. Since, you know, videocard frame buffers would always be so pitifully small, DME allowed textures to be accessed from main memory and directly accessed from the graphics core. This would allow games to grab large textures across the awesome 266MB/s AGP port without the need for huge (and at the time, prohibitively expensive) frame buffers. Obviously, frame buffer sizes have shot up. The big uptick was in 2006 when Nvidia and ATI began a war to see who had the largest frame buffer. From there, frame buffers have advanced at an incredible pace. What’s that 2GB frame buffer tick? That’s ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 which features two GPUs and separate 1GB frame buffers. In reality, the frame buffer for that generation of card was 1GB. Of course, cards with freakishly large frame buffers have been available for many years but for the most part but the frame buffer sizes didn’t always match the GPU’s performance.

Look at this chart and you’d think that Dream Machines have been running SLI or CrossFire since the late 1990s. That’s not actually true though. The 1997 and 1998 machines had dual-cards, but not in a traditional SLI/CrossFire manner. Instead, both of those early rigs had 2D cards (from Matrox and ATI) combined with 3D cards using the Voodoo and Voodoo II graphics. With 3dFX a goner by the turn of the millenium, the world had decided that cards that were fast in 3D and also had 2D functionatlity were the rage. It wasn’t until 2005 that dual-cards made a comeback to the Dream Machine with the GeForce  7800GTX cards in SLI. From there, dual-cards and more have been a standard check off list for any power hungry machine. Here’s a trick question though, which machine had the most GPUs? Not 2010. The correct answer is 2008’s dual ATI Radeon 4870 X2 cards. Each card featured two GPUs and 1GB of frame buffer. 

Power Supply

OK. It may not be the internal combustion car that’s causing global warming. Instead, maybe it’s our incessent need to have ever faster computers. From 1996 to 2010, we’ve gone from 300 watts in the most pimped out PC to 1,650 watts. Who do we blame? The GPU. You can overlay this chart with the frame buffer size and number of GPUs and you’ll see that as GPUs went from singel card to dual card and tri-card, the power requirements have seriously jumped up. It wasn’t always so. The 1997 and 1998 machines featured multiple graphics cards too. But by 2005, multicard configurations were a must have in powerful computers. The CPU doesn’t get a total pass though. The spikes in PSU sizes in 2000, 2005, 2008 and 2010 also coincide with our dual-processor builds. Realistically, if this year’s machine had been a single processor box, we could have gotten by with a 1,200 PSU or on the highend, a 1,500 PSU. Still, that’s no salve if you’re looking at a 1,650 watt or 1,500 watt requiement and and you have a wall socket rated at 15 amps. Even those with more modern homes and 20 amp are going to wonder what happens when you have a Dream Machine cranked up on a summer day and someone on the same circuit decides to microwave a Hot Pocket. Poof! We can’t make predictions, but will this year finally be the end of the insane power consumption by the graphics card?

Storage

Oh how far we’ve come eh? From 2.1GB of storage in 1996 for $729. The two 2TB drives used in this year’s machine cost $400. Looking at the chart, you can see that densities really took off in 2005. That year four 500GB drives gave us our 2TB RAID array. By 2007, those four drives became four 1TB drives. In 2008, we actually used five drives with lower density to get to 3.6TB – two were VelociRaptors and three 1TB drives as backup. The financial melt down of 2009 is apparent in our chart where the capacities dropped all the way to a mere 1.7TB of storage using a 1.5TB Seagate and a 256GB Corsair P256 drive. That Corsair drive, however, was the first apparence of the SSD. We actually think that this year would have featured 6TB or 9TB of storage but none of the hard drive vendors are willing to yet ship internal 3TB hard drives due to booting issues with current motherboards. 

Price

The pursuit of waton performance. The obsession with computing power. The incredible amount of money you can blow on a computer is easily seen by looking at the ever increasing prices of the Dream Machine. We actually looked at the price of each  system adjusted for inflation and even then, some of the prices are hard to explain. So what explains some of the blips? The 1999 machine flipped the standard Dream Machine story on its head and showed readers how to build a powerful (but realistic) PC in step-by-step manner. The price of 2000’s machine broke shattered previous prices though with its $12,000 price tag. The big ticket items were the pair of 1GHz Pentium III processors ($2,200), the 512MB of PC800 Direct RDRAM  ($1,980!). The three hard drives also drove prices prices up with $2,115 for the pair of 15K Barradua drives and $615 for the 75GB Deskstar (Yes, the ill-fated 75GXP). Another big ticket item: the Sony F500 CRT for a cool $1,900. Makes you feel pretty good about how much a 30-inch LCD cost today doesn’ t it? The price of the Dream Machine actually settled down from there. The most expensive Dream Machine ever, however, was 2008’s. The most expensive component was the custom nickel plating job at $5,000. That’s not even to mention convincing HP to essentially sell the case from its Blackbird 002. It’s no surprise that the record breaking 2008’s machine was followed by a financial collapse that had us wondering if we weren’t going to be running a Pentium Pro in the 2009 rig. 

Finally, the gallery:

1996

1997

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