Extreme machine packs some unextreme components

Month Reviewed: April 2005
Verdict: 6
URL: www.kaospc.com/

It seems as though an eternity has passed since we last reviewed a PC with an Intel badge on it. In fact, when the Kaos Extreme appeared, one editor was heard to muse “they just haven’t been in demand since the XP-38 came out.”

Kaos’ Extreme Game36 PC aims to change that mindset with its hot-off-the-fab Pentium 4 660 CPU. For those who skipped the news story on page 14 of this issue, the 660 is a beefed-up P4 560 chip. It’s still clocked at 3.6GHz, but Intel has doubled the L2 cache from 1MB to 2MB. The proc also supports iEM64T technology (aka AMD64 instructions and hardware, plus support for Microsoft’s No eXecute).

OK, enough about the processor. It’s the machine around the proc that lets a vendor strut its stuff, and Kaos takes an interesting tack with the Game36 that we’re not entirely sure we understand. The P4 is not strapped into a faster 925X or XE board, but a slightly slower 915P-based motherboard. We thought it odd that the company would use the No. 2 Intel chipset for such a new processor, but we soon spotted a trend in this PC’s specs.

The machine has RAID, but it uses a pair of 36GB WD Raptors. Since the intro of the 74GB Raptor, the 36GB has been the No. 2 model. The company also took a shortcut by dropping a GeForce 6800 GT into the system; which is… you got it, No. 2 to the GeForce 6800 Ultra. That might be because the machine can never run SLI, but wouldn’t an ATI X850 XT Platinum Edition have been a better choice? It is, after all, arguably the fastest videocard for non-SLI applications. Come to think of it, even the P4 660 is No. 2 to Intel’s new 3.73GHz P4EE.

Pardon us, but just where is the “extreme” in all of this?

Gaming performance isn’t bad for a single slotter, but the ABS SLI (reviewed on page 76) shows the true meaning of two against one. The ABS delivered benchmark numbers that were about twice as fast in Doom 3 and 3DMark05 Game 3.

This entire review seemed headed south until the processor pulled the Game36’s fat out of the fryer. Although its gaming performance was second-rate, the P4 delivered first-rate performance with a respectable 214 in SYSmark 2004 in our updated apps test.

The Game36 also kicked out an impressive score in Premiere Pro, making it the second-fastest machine we’ve tested with Adobe’s popular nonlinear editing program. So where does this leave the Game36 overall? Its application performance is quite good, thanks to the new 2MB Prescott core, but it takes a back seat to SLI-equipped rigs when it comes to gaming. This state of affairs, combined with the list of second-tier hardware inside the box, makes it hard for us to swallow Kaos’ claim that this is a high-powered gaming PC—especially when we compare it with the ABS SLI box, which costs just $200 more. --Gordon Mah Ung

+Doom: Double-layer burners, good app performance, and direct control over most system fans.

-Gloom: Too many of last year’s parts.

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