View source for Year 2001 System Build

2001 was the first year of the new millennium. It brought us a clock speed race ala the Willamette based Pentium 4 facing the higher IPC Palomino based Athlon XP. For servers and workstations, AMD took their first foray into this market with the venerable Athlon MP. On the GPU front, we have out first DirectX 8 based video cards coming out to market. It was also the year that Windows XP launched!

== The Hardware ==

=== CPU's ===
* Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz (Willamette 256K L2, 400 FSB)
* Intel Xeon 2.0 GHz (Foster 256K L2, 400 FSB)
* Intel Pentium III-S 1.4 Ghz (Tualatin, 512K L2, 133 FSB)
* AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (Palomino, 1.6 GHz, 256K L2, 266 FSB)
* AMD Athlon MP 1900+ (Palomino, 1.6 GHz, 256K L2, 266 FSB)

=== Chipset/Motherboard ===
* For Pentium 4 (Socket 478)
** i845: Gigabyte P4 Titan DDR, MSI 845 Ultra, 
** i850: Abit TH7II-RAID, Asus P4T-E
** SiS 645: Asus P4S333, Gigabyte 8SRX
** Via P4X266/A: Tyan Trinity 510
* For Xeon (dual Socket 603): 
** i860: Supermicro P4DCE, P4DC6
* For Pentium III-S (dual Socket 370)
** Serverworks Serverset III HE-SL: Supermicro P3TDE6
** Via Apollo Pro266T: MSI Pro266TD, Supermicro P3TDDE
* For Athlon XP (Socket 462)
** AMD 760: Abit KG7-RAID, Asus A7M266
** SiS 735
** Via KT266A: Abit KR7-RAID, EPoX EP-8KHA+, Shuttle AK35GTR
* For Athlon MP (dual Socket 462)
** AMD 760MPX: Tyan Thunder K7 S2462

Intel began their transition of Pentium 4's to Socket 478. The i850 with RDRAM at the time was still the overall fastest solution for Pentium 4's. The i845 launched with SDR-SDRAM, but towards the end of 2001, DDR-SDRAM support was added. The Via P4X266/A and SiS 645 provided an interesting alternative for the Pentium 4 that included support for DDR-SDRAM and were generally faster than the i845. 

For AMD, the aging AMD 760 chipset was being replaced by the Via KT266/A. Another alternative was the SiS 735 chipset.

=== Video Card ===
* Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti500 64MB
* Nvidia Quadro DCC 64MB
* ATI Radeon 8500
* STMicro Kyro II (Alternative)

Note that the FireGL 8800 (Radeon 8500 based) didn't come 2002. The STMicro Kyro II did not offer the near the same performance as Nvidia or ATI, but it was an interesting budget alternative.

=== Sound Card ===