TABLE OF CONTENTS "You get what you pay for." This colloquialism applies to computer purchases as well as anything else. Too often, computers priced significantly lower than competitors demonstrate why when taxed on a serious computational problem. Reliability is a related issue; cheaper systems, composed of cheaper components, tend to wear faster and fail more often. This appendix outlines some of things to consider when purchasing a PC for high performance computing. No specific brand name is endorsed, but (non-exhaustive) lists of companies currently offering performance components are given. Each subsystem of the computer will be considered in turn. Again, the gaming community serves as guide to performance hardware, so a search of hard-core gaming web sites provides the reader with current, performance PC hardware.
This outline applies specifically to x86 based PC systems. In general, however, the suggestions can serve as guidelines to apply to any architecture; there simply does not exist the space in this book to offer detailed comparisons of all possible hardware.
This back-and-forth question is often seen in computer books. Buying 'off-the-shelf computers, such as those sold in department stores, is fine for Internet surfing, word processing or maintaining a list of family videos in a database, but these systems are not designed with true high performance in mind. Further, not all systems of a given CPU clock speed are the same. In side-by-side comparisons, using real scientific software (Quantum Chemistry computations), the author's custom built 1200 MHz Athlon based system outperformed...
