The rest of the Spider
Highlighting the virtues of the Spider platform - which encompass a quad-core Phenom processor, 7-series chipset-based motherboard, and Radeon 3800-series graphics card(s) - AMD shipped us a complete system. The red lights were nice.
Equipped with a Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6 motherboard, 2GiB of Corsair DOMINATOR PC1066 RAM, and chugging along with an AKASA PowerMax 850W PSU, the system was setup with pre-configured CrossFire via two Radeon HD 3850 256MiB cards.
Lovely, lovely.
AMD's pushing the Spider platform as one that combines the strengths of the three constituent components into something more than the sum of the parts.
We appreciate that value is also high on the list of criterions and are somewhat nonplussed at the inclusion of expensive memory, retailing for around £100 for the 2GiB set. What's more, it's not even 'native' 1066MHz. Rather, the modules are overclocked 800MHz-rated parts, and that caused its own problems, as you will see if you read on..
