Dell XPS 720 H2C

Boom. Boom. Boom. The 800-pound gorilla has arrived. Dell’s latest XPS system, the 720 H2C, packs some serious power and plenty of extras, but its balls-to-the-wall approach doesn’t completely overshadow its proprietary roots.

The 720 H2C certainly doesn’t lack for power. Intel’s 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6800 quad-core processor, overclocked to 3.73GHz, runs alongside a pair of 8800 GTX Ultras and 4GB of Corsair Dominator DDR2 RAM clocked at 1,066MHz, all sitting on Dell’s version of the nForce 680i SLI chipset. That’s one fast gorilla.

But how fast is it? The XPS 720 cranked through FEAR at 168fps, which puts it behind only Overdrive PC’s Core2.SLI (reviewed in August), which scored 173fps, and our Dream Machine, which reached 177fps. In our Quake 4 test, the XPS 720 scored a more than respectable 205fps, right up there with most of the big guys but 10 percent slower than the Falcon Northwest system we reviewed in June, which destroyed all the competition with a score of 226fps.

Dell is serious about making this machine more than just a gaming behemoth, though, and in our multimedia tests, the quad-core 720 H2C was faster than any other rig we’ve tested. It blew through our Premiere Pro benchmark nearly 90 seconds faster than the previous record-holders, June’s quad-core Falcon Northwest machine and the dual-core Overdrive. It finished our Nero Recode bench a full minute faster than the Dream Machine, which held the recoding title for less than two months, and the 720 H2C bested the Overdrive by seven seconds in our Photoshop test.

Rounding out the 720 H2C’s media capabilities are a 2x Philips Blu-ray burner, a 16x LG DVD+/-RW drive, and Dell’s version of the X-Fi XtremeMusic soundcard. Our test system shipped with a 13-in-1 media reader and XP Media Center Edition, although the optional TV tuner and remote weren’t included. Dell says it’ll ship the rig with Vista or XP but won’t support dual boots. That’s a pity because the 320GB dual-Raptor striped RAID and 1TB Hitachi backup drive could easily have accommodated both OSes. You can do it yourself, of course, but for a machine that’s otherwise meticulously put together, it feels like an oversight.

The 720 isn’t all about brawn, though. Dell made this machine easy on the eyes, with a stunning all-black case and four sets of color-changing LEDs (two on the front, one in the back, and one inside the case), which can be controlled separately from the BIOS or, in a nice touch, the included nTune software. They can also be programmed to respond to in-game or program-specific events. Snazzy!

The H2C cooler dominates the 720’s case, but there’s still room for two 8800 Ultras, an X-Fi soundcard, and a PhysX card.

Build quality is mixed: Components are solidly in place and the railed hard drive bays are easily accessible, but the wiring was sloppy. The case itself is solid and well made (and nicely Vaderesque), with a beautiful black paint job. The screwless side panel is easily removed.

Dominating the center of the case is the H2C unit, the centerpiece of Dell’s foray into liquid cooling. The large windowed enclosure holds a high-powered pump, coolant lines, a CPU heat exchanger, a Peltier cooler, a fan, and a radiator. Oh, and one of the four sets of LEDs, albeit with fewer color options than the others. The H2C helps the 720 run fairly quietly—most of the time; under a heavy load the fans kick in, and then it gets crazy-loud.

Dell shipped a bushel of extras with our machine, including Razer’s Tarantula keyboard and Copperhead mouse, as well as an Ageia PhysX card, which just seems silly to us. Sure, it’s an optional component and dedicated physics processors may one day be awesome, but until there are PhysX games worth playing, the card just takes up a PCI slot.

We have only a few other quibbles with this machine. First, the front panel is composed of the same flimsy plastic lattice that’s appeared on previous XPS models. Drive bay covers kept falling off their hinges, and the horizontal bars bend easily. Not a huge deal, but in an otherwise solid case, they feel cheap.

Speaking of solid, this machine is ­heavy. Top-heavy, too—it comes with a stand, complete with backward-swept chrome “wings” to keep it from toppling over sideways.

Our big complaint with this machine is Dell’s use of a proprietary motherboard and power supply. The BTX mobo means upgrading your system will be almost impossible, as Intel stopped development on the BTX standard more than a year ago. The power supply is also proprietary and features a nonstandard power connection, which means you can only use a Dell power cord.

Overall, the XPS 720 H2C marks the first Dell we’ve seen in a while that can stand toe-to-toe with the baddest machines in the business. Its lightning-fast multimedia performance and sick gaming frame rates make it a good choice for gamers and media gurus alike. And with a quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM, it should age well. Just be aware that the BTX formfactor will make it difficult to perform major upgrades. And don’t lose your power cord.

It’s big. It’s fast. It’s shiny. It’s… a damn fine system in a sweet-looking case.

Dell XPS 720 H2C
www.dell.com

Enchanted

Blazing-fast media and gaming performance. Looks good.

Slanted

Damn you, proprietary systems! And PhysX? Really?

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Dell XPS 720 H2C

HP Blackbird 002

Label us Luddites for resisting Windows Vista, but there’s no arguing the point that the new OS currently offers very little you can’t get faster with Windows XP. That goes double for games, which is why we’re baffled by HP’s decision to run Vista Ultimate on the groundbreaking Blackbird 002 gaming rig it sent us.

We’re equally surprised that HP sent us a machine it knew would blue-screen when going into suspend mode (and then leave it to us to discover this). Those two decisions are unfortunate because nearly every other facet of the Blackbird is utterly brilliant. Here’s proof that HP’s acquisition of VoodooPC was much more than an opportunistic move (by a company that many gamers dismiss as stodgily conservative and more appropriate for middle-aged newbs) to glom on to the cachet of a high-profile boutique PC vendor.

Actually, we’d argue that HP shed its old-fogey image months ago when it shipped the superbly designed TouchSmart IQ770 (reviewed April ’07). Although that desktop system is also limited to Vista, the embedded 17-inch touch-screen LCD justifies the decision (and you wouldn’t play games on it anyway).

The Blackbird is a different story. Although HP tells us consumers will be able to order machines with either XP or Vista, we review rigs as they are sent to us. As for the blue-screen issue, HP says it’ll have it fixed before you read this review.
Those issues aside, HP and Voodoo deserve high praise for building an exciting and innovative personal computer while using industry-standard parts for every key component. One glance at the all-aluminum case reveals that it’s highly customized; nonetheless, it will accommodate any ATX motherboard and any standard power supply.

Swinging open the side access panel, which easily lifts off its smooth-as-silk hinges, reveals an Asus Striker Extreme motherboard. In a ballsy move, HP adjusted Nvidia’s nForce 680i SLI BIOS to allow a pair of ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT cards to run in CrossFire mode—tweaking the noses of AMD and Nvidia in the process.

Removing the Blackbird's access panel reveals beauty that's more than skin deep.

Each of the Radeons is outfitted with 1GB of DDR4 RAM and cooled by an Asetek LCLC liquid-cooling system. The LCLC also wicks heat away from the 3GHz Intel QX6850 (Core 2 Extreme quad core), which HP overclocked to 3.76GHz. You can order a Blackbird with an X-Fi soundcard and an Ageia PhysX card, but our unit had neither (relying on Analog Devices’s Integrated Digital SoundMax HD Audio for sound, installed on a riser card to escape electrical noise on the mobo).

The Topower Computer TOP-1100W DVT power supply is rated to deliver 1,100 watts (the 2900 XTs, you’ll recall, are insatiable power hogs). The PSU is mounted at the bottom of the case, which is elevated by a large aluminum foot to allow cool air to enter the case from the bottom as well as the sides. Cable management is simplified by modular power plugs, but there’s more to it than that. The SATA cables for the hard drives, for example, are routed to a set of sockets mounted on an internal backplane. The drives are mounted on trays that slide into a rack and plug into this backplane.

Two vertically mounted slot-fed DVD burners are hidden inside the case’s heatsink-like grill, with only LED-lit eject buttons revealing their presence. The case can accommodate a third (tray type) optical drive next to the other two. An equally well-disguised pop-up module on top of the case harbors a 15-in-1 media-card reader, jacks for a headphone and mic, two USB ports, and a FireWire port.

Close this swing-out panel and its spring-steel strips will push installed PCI Express cards firmly into their slots.

We’re excited about many of the Blackbird’s innovations, but HP’s decision to send us a Vista PC severely undermined the machine’s gaming benchmark numbers (including a Quake 4 performance that was slower than our aging zero-point rig’s). “What about DX10?” you ask. “Pretty much irrelevant for now,” we say. And while we applaud the company’s decision to enable CrossFire on an nForce motherboard, our experience has been that Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra are both faster than the Radeon HD 2900 XT (although the GTX’s edge evaporates when running Vista).

Buy this machine and you won’t care which camp wins the next skirmish in the GPU wars because you’ll be covered either way—as rightly you should be. That’s just one of the features that endow the Blackbird 002 with such potential for greatness. Yes, this PC deserves so much better than Vista.

The Blackbird has the best access panel we've ever seen on a PC, with a chrome-plated latch, slick hinges, and a foam-rubber gasket that dampens all vibration-induced noise.

HP Blackbird 002
www.hp.com

Raven

Awesome design using standard components; CrossFire running on nForce.

Craven

Videocard driver crash bug; unimpressive gaming performance (due to Vista).

SPECS
	HP Blackbird 002
CPU	Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 quad core (3GHz overclocked to 3.67GHz)
MOBO	ASUS Striker Extreme (Nvidia nForce 680i SLI)
RAM	2GB Corsair Dominator XMS2 DDR2 (800MHz overclocked to 1,0066MHz)
LAN	Dual Gigabit LAN (Nvidia)
HARD DRIVES	Two 160GB WD Raptors (10,000rpm SATA) in RAID-0, one 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
OPTICAL	Two TSST TS-T632L DVD burners
VIDEOCARD	Two Ati Radeon HD 2900 XTs with 1GB GDDR4 memory in CrossFire
SOUNDCARD	Analog Devices Integrated Digital SoundMax HD Audio
CASE	HP Blackbird

BENCHMARKS
	HP Blackbird 002
SYSmark2004 SE	WNR
Premiere Pro 2.0	1,380 sec
Photoshop CS2	131 sec
Recode H.264	WNR
FEAR 1.07	130 fps
Quake 4	105.3 fps
Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU.

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HP Blackbird 002

Overdrive PC Core2.SLI

One thing we respect about Overdrive PC is that it’s never predictable. These guys seem to always take the path of most resistance.

In this case, Overdrive PC has constructed a rig whose sole purpose seems to be smashing our benchmarks. The company’s theory: Why go with a quad-core setup when you can push a dual core to higher speeds and guarantee stability? Since the overwhelming majority of applications aren’t multithreaded for quad core, why not push the hell out of a dual core?

That’s the course OPC took with the Core 2.SLI. The company overclocks Intel’s newly minted 3GHz Core 2 Duo E6850 to 3.8GHz by cranking the chip’s stock 1,333MHz front-side bus to 1,900MHz. Forgoing the quad cores also simplifies cooling needs—it’s all air here, baby! There’s no need for exotic (and perhaps leaky) water cooling and it’s pretty darn quiet to boot. The rig’s Patriot DDR2/1066 RAM gets a workout as well with a bump up to 1,250MHz. OPC also snagged a pair of GeForce 8800 Ultras, the fastest GPUs on earth. Of course, true to form, OPC also takes the cards’ GPU and RAM speeds up. That in itself tells you about OPC’s technical prowess. While civvies aren’t allowed to overclock the stream processor on the 8800s, those laws apparently don’t apply to OPC. But we’d expect nothing less from a system vendor that goes as far as tweaking the BIOS on the EVGA 680i SLI board with its own settings and profiles.

So how does OPC’s gamble pay off? Can a dual core really compete in the quad-core era? First, the good news: In our GPU-limited FEAR gaming test, the Core2.SLI vaults over the previous record by a massive 15 percent. Unfortunately, not all games are graphics bound. In the multithreaded Quake 4 test, both the CPU and GPU count, and the Falcon Northwest Mach V we reviewed in June continues to hold the record at 226fps versus the 210fps of the Overdrive.

The Core2.SLI tied for the top score in our Premiere Pro 2.0 HDV test (held by the 3.73GHz quad-core Mach V we reviewed in June) and also our Photoshop CS2 test (held by the 3.46GHz quad-core Digital Storm Twister Ultra 4 we tested in July). So, are those two other cores really just freeloading bastards after all? Well, maybe not. In our Nero Recode 2.0 test, in which we encode an MPEG2 file to H.264 for the iPod, the dual core can’t hang. The Twister Ultra 4 holds the record at 1,249 seconds, while the Mach V takes a close second at 1,315 seconds. The Core2.SLI, while fast at 1,505 seconds, is out of contention. As a comparison, the stock 2.66GHz Polywell quad core we reviewed in March was slightly slower at 1,653 seconds. The story would be the same in any multithreaded encoding test, which makes us wonder if dual core is the right way to go.

That, ultimately, is the prickly problem that will haunt the Overdrive configuration. As more apps and games adopt multithreading, will you wonder if you should have bought a quad core? In Overdrive’s favor, however, is the fact that it is a smokingly fast gaming machine. In 90 percent of today’s games, we can easily say that the Core 2.SLI will kick ass over all other comers. However, as that 10 percent grows, so might your regrets.

Most of Overdrive PC's magic can't be seen in pictures

Overdrive PC, Core2.SLI
www.overdrivepc.com

Cops

Damned quiet and damned fast in gaming.

Reno 911!

Lack of quad-core support will hurt future performance.

SPECS
	Overdrive PC Core2.SLI
CPU	Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (3GHz overclocked to 3.8GHz)
MOBO	EVGA 680i SLI
RAM	2GB Patriot DDR2/1066 (two 1GB sticks)
LAN	Dual Gigabit LAN (Nvidia)
HARD DRIVES	Two 150GB WD Raptors (10,000rpm SATA) in RAID-0
OPTICAL	Plextor PX-755SA
VIDEOCARD	Two GeForce 8800 Ultras in SLI (662MHz core/1,200MHz RAM)
SOUNDCARD	Sound Blaster X-fi Fatal1ty Edition
CASE	Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 Enermax Galaxy 1000 PSU

BENCHMARKS
	Overdrive Core2.SLI
SYSmark2004 SE	WNR
Premiere Pro 2.0	1,498 sec
Photoshop CS2	141 sec
Recode H.264	1,505 sec
FEAR 1.07	173.5fps
Quake 4	210 fps
Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU.

READ MORE -
Overdrive PC Core2.SLI

Overdrive PC Core2.SLI

One thing we respect about Overdrive PC is that it’s never predictable. These guys seem to always take the path of most resistance.

In this case, Overdrive PC has constructed a rig whose sole purpose seems to be smashing our benchmarks. The company’s theory: Why go with a quad-core setup when you can push a dual core to higher speeds and guarantee stability? Since the overwhelming majority of applications aren’t multithreaded for quad core, why not push the hell out of a dual core?

That’s the course OPC took with the Core 2.SLI. The company overclocks Intel’s newly minted 3GHz Core 2 Duo E6850 to 3.8GHz by cranking the chip’s stock 1,333MHz front-side bus to 1,900MHz. Forgoing the quad cores also simplifies cooling needs—it’s all air here, baby! There’s no need for exotic (and perhaps leaky) water cooling and it’s pretty darn quiet to boot. The rig’s Patriot DDR2/1066 RAM gets a workout as well with a bump up to 1,250MHz. OPC also snagged a pair of GeForce 8800 Ultras, the fastest GPUs on earth. Of course, true to form, OPC also takes the cards’ GPU and RAM speeds up. That in itself tells you about OPC’s technical prowess. While civvies aren’t allowed to overclock the stream processor on the 8800s, those laws apparently don’t apply to OPC. But we’d expect nothing less from a system vendor that goes as far as tweaking the BIOS on the EVGA 680i SLI board with its own settings and profiles.

So how does OPC’s gamble pay off? Can a dual core really compete in the quad-core era? First, the good news: In our GPU-limited FEAR gaming test, the Core2.SLI vaults over the previous record by a massive 15 percent. Unfortunately, not all games are graphics bound. In the multithreaded Quake 4 test, both the CPU and GPU count, and the Falcon Northwest Mach V we reviewed in June continues to hold the record at 226fps versus the 210fps of the Overdrive.

The Core2.SLI tied for the top score in our Premiere Pro 2.0 HDV test (held by the 3.73GHz quad-core Mach V we reviewed in June) and also our Photoshop CS2 test (held by the 3.46GHz quad-core Digital Storm Twister Ultra 4 we tested in July). So, are those two other cores really just freeloading bastards after all? Well, maybe not. In our Nero Recode 2.0 test, in which we encode an MPEG2 file to H.264 for the iPod, the dual core can’t hang. The Twister Ultra 4 holds the record at 1,249 seconds, while the Mach V takes a close second at 1,315 seconds. The Core2.SLI, while fast at 1,505 seconds, is out of contention. As a comparison, the stock 2.66GHz Polywell quad core we reviewed in March was slightly slower at 1,653 seconds. The story would be the same in any multithreaded encoding test, which makes us wonder if dual core is the right way to go.

That, ultimately, is the prickly problem that will haunt the Overdrive configuration. As more apps and games adopt multithreading, will you wonder if you should have bought a quad core? In Overdrive’s favor, however, is the fact that it is a smokingly fast gaming machine. In 90 percent of today’s games, we can easily say that the Core 2.SLI will kick ass over all other comers. However, as that 10 percent grows, so might your regrets.

Most of Overdrive PC's magic can't be seen in pictures

Overdrive PC, Core2.SLI
www.overdrivepc.com

Cops

Damned quiet and damned fast in gaming.

Reno 911!

Lack of quad-core support will hurt future performance.

SPECS
	Overdrive PC Core2.SLI
CPU	Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (3GHz overclocked to 3.8GHz)
MOBO	EVGA 680i SLI
RAM	2GB Patriot DDR2/1066 (two 1GB sticks)
LAN	Dual Gigabit LAN (Nvidia)
HARD DRIVES	Two 150GB WD Raptors (10,000rpm SATA) in RAID-0
OPTICAL	Plextor PX-755SA
VIDEOCARD	Two GeForce 8800 Ultras in SLI (662MHz core/1,200MHz RAM)
SOUNDCARD	Sound Blaster X-fi Fatal1ty Edition
CASE	Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 Enermax Galaxy 1000 PSU

BENCHMARKS
	Overdrive Core2.SLI
SYSmark2004 SE	WNR
Premiere Pro 2.0	1,498 sec
Photoshop CS2	141 sec
Recode H.264	1,505 sec
FEAR 1.07	173.5fps
Quake 4	210 fps
Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU.

READ MORE -
Overdrive PC Core2.SLI

Gordon Mah Ung Overdrive PC Core2.SLI

One thing we respect about Overdrive PC is that it’s never predictable. These guys seem to always take the path of most resistance.

In this case, Overdrive PC has constructed a rig whose sole purpose seems to be smashing our benchmarks. The company’s theory: Why go with a quad-core setup when you can push a dual core to higher speeds and guarantee stability? Since the overwhelming majority of applications aren’t multithreaded for quad core, why not push the hell out of a dual core?

That’s the course OPC took with the Core 2.SLI. The company overclocks Intel’s newly minted 3GHz Core 2 Duo E6850 to 3.8GHz by cranking the chip’s stock 1,333MHz front-side bus to 1,900MHz. Forgoing the quad cores also simplifies cooling needs—it’s all air here, baby! There’s no need for exotic (and perhaps leaky) water cooling and it’s pretty darn quiet to boot. The rig’s Patriot DDR2/1066 RAM gets a workout as well with a bump up to 1,250MHz. OPC also snagged a pair of GeForce 8800 Ultras, the fastest GPUs on earth. Of course, true to form, OPC also takes the cards’ GPU and RAM speeds up. That in itself tells you about OPC’s technical prowess. While civvies aren’t allowed to overclock the stream processor on the 8800s, those laws apparently don’t apply to OPC. But we’d expect nothing less from a system vendor that goes as far as tweaking the BIOS on the EVGA 680i SLI board with its own settings and profiles.

So how does OPC’s gamble pay off? Can a dual core really compete in the quad-core era? First, the good news: In our GPU-limited FEAR gaming test, the Core2.SLI vaults over the previous record by a massive 15 percent. Unfortunately, not all games are graphics bound. In the multithreaded Quake 4 test, both the CPU and GPU count, and the Falcon Northwest Mach V we reviewed in June continues to hold the record at 226fps versus the 210fps of the Overdrive.

The Core2.SLI tied for the top score in our Premiere Pro 2.0 HDV test (held by the 3.73GHz quad-core Mach V we reviewed in June) and also our Photoshop CS2 test (held by the 3.46GHz quad-core Digital Storm Twister Ultra 4 we tested in July). So, are those two other cores really just freeloading bastards after all? Well, maybe not. In our Nero Recode 2.0 test, in which we encode an MPEG2 file to H.264 for the iPod, the dual core can’t hang. The Twister Ultra 4 holds the record at 1,249 seconds, while the Mach V takes a close second at 1,315 seconds. The Core2.SLI, while fast at 1,505 seconds, is out of contention. As a comparison, the stock 2.66GHz Polywell quad core we reviewed in March was slightly slower at 1,653 seconds. The story would be the same in any multithreaded encoding test, which makes us wonder if dual core is the right way to go.

That, ultimately, is the prickly problem that will haunt the Overdrive configuration. As more apps and games adopt multithreading, will you wonder if you should have bought a quad core? In Overdrive’s favor, however, is the fact that it is a smokingly fast gaming machine. In 90 percent of today’s games, we can easily say that the Core 2.SLI will kick ass over all other comers. However, as that 10 percent grows, so might your regrets.

Most of Overdrive PC's magic can't be seen in pictures

Overdrive PC, Core2.SLI
www.overdrivepc.com

Cops

Damned quiet and damned fast in gaming.

Reno 911!

Lack of quad-core support will hurt future performance.

SPECS
	Overdrive PC Core2.SLI
CPU	Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (3GHz overclocked to 3.8GHz)
MOBO	EVGA 680i SLI
RAM	2GB Patriot DDR2/1066 (two 1GB sticks)
LAN	Dual Gigabit LAN (Nvidia)
HARD DRIVES	Two 150GB WD Raptors (10,000rpm SATA) in RAID-0
OPTICAL	Plextor PX-755SA
VIDEOCARD	Two GeForce 8800 Ultras in SLI (662MHz core/1,200MHz RAM)
SOUNDCARD	Sound Blaster X-fi Fatal1ty Edition
CASE	Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 Enermax Galaxy 1000 PSU

BENCHMARKS
	Overdrive Core2.SLI
SYSmark2004 SE	WNR
Premiere Pro 2.0	1,498 sec
Photoshop CS2	141 sec
Recode H.264	1,505 sec
FEAR 1.07	173.5fps
Quake 4	210 fps
Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU.

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Gordon Mah Ung Overdrive PC Core2.SLI

Digital Storm Twister Ultra 4

Maximum PC’s mandate has always been that performance rules all else. But recently we’ve been harping about nothing but stability. It’s not that we previously ignored this area, but lately we’ve been inundated with rigs that have been overclocked so aggressively they make our standard benchmarks blow up within minutes. Because of this, our new message has been stability, stability, stability.

Apparently, Digital Storm got our memo. The company shipped us its current speed king: Intel’s 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core QX6800 clocked up to a mere 3.46GHz running a pair of 8800 GTX cards and 2GB of Corsair Dominator RAM cranked up to 1,066MHz, all on an EVGA 680i SLI board. From a hardware perspective, this is nothing new; this setup is similar to what we’ve been seeing since January.

Normally, this would make for one big yawner of a story, but the Twister hits the right notes for us. First up: performance. Although it doesn’t rip the speed crown from the wickedly fast Falcon Northwest Mach V that we reviewed in June, it does manage to top the higher-clocked Falcon in a few runs. Surprisingly, in Adobe Photoshop CS2, the Twister just squeezes by the Mach V with a score of 142 seconds versus 149. The difference is negligible due to the margin of error, but the Falcon Mach V has a 267MHz clock advantage, so count this as a win for the Twister. We’re also marking the Nero H.264 encode test as a win for the Twister. Although its score in this test is about a minute slower than the Mach V’s, the Twister is running a slower CPU and is 100 percent stable.

The Twister is top gun in our FEAR test, with a score that’s just a tad faster than that of the similarly equipped ABS PC that we reviewed in February. So, in performance the Twister holds three Lab records and really doesn’t have to apologize for performance elsewhere.

In build quality, we were interested to see if the company paid attention to items the techs missed last time, such as whether all the front USB ports were connected and operating. Fortunately, there were no such bone-headed errors. We do have to point out, however, that connecting two DVD burners to the same PATA port will kill your performance if you try to burn to multiple drives at once.

But is the Twister stable? Yes. We flew through all of our normal benchmarks with no issues—well, except for SYSmark2004 SE, which refused to run. We can’t blame the Twister for this though, since SYSmark2004 SE hasn’t worked in months. We did run the new SYSmark2007 Preview with no problems, and the Twister achieved an overall score of 219. We also subjected the Twister to our new quad-core torture test, Prime 95, with only one issue. On one of several overnight runs, the app reported a data anomaly, but it didn’t crash or lock up. On the Mach V, the Prime 95 test caused a spontaneous reboot within minutes. Our other multithreading tests also went without a hitch. So we have more faith in this rig’s long-term stability than in the stability of any machine we’ve tested since the Polywell Poly I680SLI-QX (March 2007), which sported a stock-clocked quad core.

That leaves the Twister in a great spot. It holds three Lab records and is much cheaper than the Mach V—and it’s stable.

READ MORE -
Digital Storm Twister Ultra 4

Vigor Gaming Force Recon QXN

Welcome to another edition of Maximum PC Theater. For our main attraction this evening, we’re featuring a play by Vigor Gaming entitled Force Recon QXN. There’s a scene in act 1 in which the computer utterly fails to run in any useful capacity… it brings tears to our eyes. Be sure you don’t miss it.

Or, rather, do miss the Force Recon QXN. As has become an unfortunate tradition at Maximum PC, we again find ourselves with a system that looks sweet on paper but utterly fails the quality assurance part of the benchmarking process. In layman’s terms, it does not work. It fails to boot consistently. It fails benchmark runs.

We blame overly aggressive overclocking for this electronic disaster. Like those who came before it, Vigor cranked an Intel QX6700 quad-core processor from the stock speed of 2.66GHz to a mighty 3.46GHz. But we certainly don’t blame the company for doing so; in today’s extreme-computing (and non-multicore-supported) environment, a stock-clocked quad-core processor simply can’t hold up to dual-core clock speeds.

See that wiring job? Now that’s quality work. At least your new footrest will look great.

If only Vigor had spent as much time testing the machine as it put into its appearance, we might have had an actual working computer. This system is loaded with more tweaks than any of the similarly configured quad-core machines we’ve reviewed, so we were a bit surprised to see lower frame rates in all of our gaming tests (when they ran). Our quad-champion Maingear F131 (reviewed in our January 2007 issue) destroyed the poor Force Recon by almost 15fps in FEAR and 20fps in Quake 4.

Application testing painfully highlighted the Force Recon’s stability problems, particularly our standard video encoding test, in which we use Nero Recode to transform a DVD-quality rip of Terminator 2 into an H.264-based video iPod file. It’s as if the Force Recon took one look at the project and decided to head out for a smoke break. The process took nearly 40 minutes to complete, almost double the 22-minute score the Maingear laid down.

We were beginning to wonder if we should just take this sick machine out back and shoot it, but the Force Recon didn’t even make it out the door. The machine officially died during our Premiere encoding test. No blue screen, just random restarts.

When SYSmark caused the same problems, we set all the components back to stock clock speeds, but the system got progressively worse. After Force Recon started to reboot spontaneously, we gave Vigor a call, and the company sent us a recovery-disc image.

Said recovery disk ended up destroying what was left of the system. Windows barely made it to the loading screen before blue-screening.

The final nail in the Force Recon’s coffin is that it actually ran slower than all of the other nonworking systems we’ve tested, at least in the benchmarks we got to run. That’s certainly not something to be proud of

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Vigor Gaming Force Recon QXN

Vigor Gaming Force Recon QXN

Welcome to another edition of Maximum PC Theater. For our main attraction this evening, we’re featuring a play by Vigor Gaming entitled Force Recon QXN. There’s a scene in act 1 in which the computer utterly fails to run in any useful capacity… it brings tears to our eyes. Be sure you don’t miss it.

Or, rather, do miss the Force Recon QXN. As has become an unfortunate tradition at Maximum PC, we again find ourselves with a system that looks sweet on paper but utterly fails the quality assurance part of the benchmarking process. In layman’s terms, it does not work. It fails to boot consistently. It fails benchmark runs.

We blame overly aggressive overclocking for this electronic disaster. Like those who came before it, Vigor cranked an Intel QX6700 quad-core processor from the stock speed of 2.66GHz to a mighty 3.46GHz. But we certainly don’t blame the company for doing so; in today’s extreme-computing (and non-multicore-supported) environment, a stock-clocked quad-core processor simply can’t hold up to dual-core clock speeds.

See that wiring job? Now that’s quality work. At least your new footrest will look great.

If only Vigor had spent as much time testing the machine as it put into its appearance, we might have had an actual working computer. This system is loaded with more tweaks than any of the similarly configured quad-core machines we’ve reviewed, so we were a bit surprised to see lower frame rates in all of our gaming tests (when they ran). Our quad-champion Maingear F131 (reviewed in our January 2007 issue) destroyed the poor Force Recon by almost 15fps in FEAR and 20fps in Quake 4.

Application testing painfully highlighted the Force Recon’s stability problems, particularly our standard video encoding test, in which we use Nero Recode to transform a DVD-quality rip of Terminator 2 into an H.264-based video iPod file. It’s as if the Force Recon took one look at the project and decided to head out for a smoke break. The process took nearly 40 minutes to complete, almost double the 22-minute score the Maingear laid down.

We were beginning to wonder if we should just take this sick machine out back and shoot it, but the Force Recon didn’t even make it out the door. The machine officially died during our Premiere encoding test. No blue screen, just random restarts.

When SYSmark caused the same problems, we set all the components back to stock clock speeds, but the system got progressively worse. After Force Recon started to reboot spontaneously, we gave Vigor a call, and the company sent us a recovery-disc image.

Said recovery disk ended up destroying what was left of the system. Windows barely made it to the loading screen before blue-screening.

The final nail in the Force Recon’s coffin is that it actually ran slower than all of the other nonworking systems we’ve tested, at least in the benchmarks we got to run. That’s certainly not something to be proud of.

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Vigor Gaming Force Recon QXN

Lenovo Launches Uber Eco-Friendly ThinkStation E20 Workstation

PIQOO | www.piqoo.blogspot.com

Talk about playing both ends of the spectrum. Lenovo this week announced the ThinkStation E20, the first in a new series of entry-level workstations the company says costs less than $6001 (yikes!) with models starting at $599 (sweet!).

"We've found there are a number of CAD and DCC professionals who are currently getting by on desktop PC hardware due to budget constraints," said Mark Cohen, vice president, Enterprise Products, Lenovo. "They're running workstation-class applications and could benefit from using true workstation hardware. We designed the ThinkStation E20 with these users in mind to put true workstation performance within their reach."

Lenovo has lined up a range of processors for the E20 line, including Core i3, Core i5, Pentium, and Xeon 3400 series processors. Buyers will also be able to choose from Nvidia's discrete Quadro line or step up to the FX1800.

The new workstations will be available by the middle of this month.

Image Credit: Lenovo

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Lenovo Launches Uber Eco-Friendly ThinkStation E20 Workstation

Alienware Aurora ALX

PIQOO | www.piqoo.blogspot.com

A Xenomorph might be involved

One of the PC’s weaknesses is the tendency to be generic. That’s certainly not a weakness of Alienware’s new Aurora ALX. Using a new redesigned chassis, there’s no way your Aurora ALX will be confused with a bland black box.

And how could it, given its signature Xenomorph look? Previous Alienware cases have felt like rebadged commodity cases, but this new case is clearly unique. When we plugged the PC into the wall socket, the set of ventilation vents on top slowly flapped open and closed—as though the ominous black creature were alive and just took a breath.

Getting inside of the case added to the mystery. Like a caveman hammering away on a flying saucer with a rock, we just didn’t know how to open the thing. We finally found that lifting the very last ventilation flap unlocks the side hatch. With the door off of the blowing, pulsing, and breathing Aurora ALX, was it alien technology we saw? Fortunately, it was more Earth-bound. Inside, we found a water-cooled Core i7-975 Extreme Edition on a custom Micro ATX X58 motherboard. Graphics were in the hands of the latest hotness, two CrossFired ATI Radeon HD 5870s. Along with 6GB of RAM and a Blu-ray combo drive, there wasn’t much wanting in the rig. We do take issue with the storage configuration, which comprises two 1TB drives in RAID 0, with no local backup drive. Scary. However, we like the mounting system, which gives you easy access to drives.

The Aurora ALX sports programmable perimeter lighting and top venting that opens as the case warms up.

Also quite cool is the Aurora’s new lighting system. Multicolor LED lights are embedded in the case, and the lights on the included keyboard and mouse can be changed in Windows to pulsate or even alert you if you have email waiting. The same application also lets you control the vents on top. It’s well done and far beyond what you can get from the typical boutique vendors, whose main customization is exotic paint.

This would be nothing without performance behind it, and the Aurora’s stock clock Core i7-975 performs as you’d expect it to. It’s plenty speedy but by no means a record breaker, especially when compared to the spate of 4GHz 975 rigs we’ve tested. The vast majority of those systems, however, pushed the $7,000 to $9,000 mark. The Aurora ALX is practically a bargain at $4,200. Compared to its direct peers, though, the Aurora ALX poses an interesting dilemma. Falcon’s $4,800 Talon system (reviewed in January) is faster, thanks to its overclocked 3.83GHz Core i7 and quad CrossFire configuration, but it’s also an LGA1156 system. The Aurora ALX is LGA1366, so when Intel comes out with its hexa-core Core i9 next year, the ALX can take the upgrade—the Falcon cannot.

That puts the ALX in a good place for folks who want a unique machine—without any of the hassles that can crop up with overclocking.

Alienware Aurora ALX

Probiotics

Truly unique chassis with multicolor perimeter lighting.

Probed

Needs backup drive for storage; outperformed by overclocked machines.

Alienware

WINDOWS 7 BENCHMARKS

	Zero Point	Alienware Aurora ALX
Premiere Pro CS3	496 sec	509
Photoshop CS3	94 sec	87
ProShow	513 sec	532
MainConcept	977 sec	994
Crysis	37 fps	57
Unreal Tournament 3	198 fps	225

Our current desktop zero point consists of a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core i7-920 overclocked to 3.66GHz, 6GB of Patriot DDR3/1333, a Radeon HD 4870 X2, and a 1.5TB 7,200rpm Seagate 7200.11 hard drive. The motherboard is a Gigabute GA-EX58-UDR3 motherboard and a Corsair TX850 PSU. OS is 64-bit Windows 7.

Specifications

Processor	Intel 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition
MOBO	Custom X58
RAM	6GB Corsair DDR3/1600
Videocard	Two ATI Radeon HD 5870 in CrossFire mode
Soundcard	Integrated Realtek
Storage	Two 1TB 7,200rpm in RAID 0
Optical	Blu-ray combo drive
Case/PSU	Cosmic Black ALX chassis/875 watt PSU

Alienware Aurora ALX Gaming Desktop Computer (Intel Core i7 920 1280GB/12GB)
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		$2,499.00
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Alienware Aurora ALX