DO YOU HEAR that?
It’s the hum and whir of mighty cooling fans in the fastest gaming desktops we’ve ever seen.
We tested these powerhouses with our application based WorldBench 6 benchmark, along with updated gaming tests – using Unreal Tournament 3 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars that measure performance at various settings, including high resolution (2560×1600) gaming. To make the most direct comparisons possible, we no longer factor in the price of bundled monitors in our desktop PC rankings.
Our Best Buy goes to Falcon Northwest’s Mach V. Equipped with Intel’s new Nehalem-based 3.2-GHz Core i7 Extreme 965 CPU (overclocked to 3.8 GHz), a whopping 12GB of DDR31600 RAM, and two ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics boards, the Mach V prevailed in almost every graphics test. Even so, both the Xi MTower HAF-SLI and the Hardcore Computer Reactor (which ranked second and fifth, respectively, on the chart) equaled its record WorldBench 6 result of 163.
The Xi pushes the limit for overclocking by cranking an older 3.33-GHz Core 2 Duo E8600 to an eyeball-popping 4.5 GHz. Crazier still, the rig depends on air cooling alone to achieve this massive boost in performance.
Taking the opposite approach is Hardcore Computer’s Reactor, a monster to behold with one of the best chassis designs we’ve seen. The system’s 3.2-GHz QX9770 CPU (overclocked to 4 GHz), 4GB of RAM, two power supplies, and three overclocked nVidia GTX-280 graphics boards are completely submerged in non-conductive oil. Though its configurations start at about $4500, the Reactor we tested broke the $10K barrier with three 64GB solid-state drives (in RAID 0) for your boot volume, plus two 1-TB 7200-rpm drives (mirrored in RAID 1) for file storage. Total hard drive space that’s actually available: 1.2TB.
Vigor Gaming’s tried-and true Force Recon BT provides 1.8TB of storage and good expandability via four spare external 5.25-inch drive bays. On the other hand, its performance slipped against the new competition, including Überclok’s Reaktor.
Überclok overclocks the Reaktor’s Quad 9550 CPU to 3.41 GHz and adds a great graphics card. But poor peripheral and PCI choices drop it to fourth on our list.
via PC World Jan 2009
