Monarch Nemesis

Posted 08/24/2005 at 10:16am | by

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Although Monarch Systems has been in the PC-building business for a long time, the company is best known for its small-formfactor machines. But we wanted to see if Monarch had the chops to build a lust-worthy full-size machine. The company proved worthy by sending one monster of a desktop system—the Nemesis—which happens to be the first computer outfitted with AMD’s Athlon FX-57 CPU to roll into our Lab.

The FX-57 represents a move to AMD’s 90nm “San Diego” CPU core, and it boasts a clock-speed bump from 2.6 to 2.8GHz, support for SSE3 instructions, and a tweaked on-die memory controller. But the FX-57 isn’t the only new part occupying the roomy confines of the custom-painted Thermaltake Shark case: Monarch has plugged in two brand-spanking-new nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX videocards in SLI—another first for us (aside from those in the Dream Machine, of course). Each of these wonder twins features a core clock speed of 430MHz and 256MB of GDDR3 RAM clocked at 600MHz. There are a lot of horses pulling this buggy.

Monarch chose Asus’ solid-as-a-rock A8N-SLI Premium motherboard (nForce4 chipset) and plugged in 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM, a Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum soundcard, and a Plextor PX-716SA DVD+/-RW optical drive. Storage duties are ably handled by a 75GB Western Digital Raptor, plus a pair of 250GB WD SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration.

With that much power locked up in the case, we couldn’t wait to see how the FX-57 and GeForce 7800 GTX combo would perform. To no one’s surprise, the Nemesis chewed through our benchmarks like Dom DeLuise tearing his way through a Sizzler’s all-you-can-eat buffet. The Nemesis netted 100-plus percent improvement over our zero-point system in our 3DMark05 Game 3 test, turning in a mind-blowing 59fps. That’s 15 percent faster than the scary-fast 3.73GHz P4-powered Falcon Northwest Mach V we reviewed in May 2005, and a whopping 56 percent faster than the 2.6GHz FX-55-powered Polywell Poly 939N4-SLI we reviewed in June 2005.

Based on these numbers, we decided to subject the Nemesis to the default 3DMark05 test, just for fun: Monarch’s system calmly spit back a score of 12,292, which is about 20 percent faster than systems powered by GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in SLI.

The Nemesis’ Doom 3 score of 94.3fps was impressive enough that we decided to crank up the detail settings to Ultra—where we saw a drop of just five frames per second. SYSmark2004 performance was equally great, netting a solid 227. That’s not the highest score we’ve ever seen—that distinction belongs to the Mach V and its brutishly overclocked, liquid-chilled P4—but it does beat all the FX-55 systems we’ve seen to date. The rest of the benchmark numbers aren’t as eye-poppingly impressive when compared with our zero-point scores, but we did see performance boosts consistent with our expectations of what the FX-57 might offer over the FX-55. Besides, gaming performance is where it’s at, and Monarch throws in a software bundle consisting of Half-Life 2, the 64-bit edition of Far Cry, and Lego Star Wars, making the Nemesis ready to rock right out of the box.

We tried hard to find something seriously wrong with the Nemesis, and the only thing we could come up with was a loose wire that had somehow come in contact with the fins of the front intake fan; this created an audible noise similar to the baseball card we stuck inside the spokes of our childhood Schwinn. It isn’t uncommon for things to come loose during shipping, and given Monarch’s otherwise-excellent cable-management skills, we’re willing to chalk it up to an isolated incident. Besides, we were so busy being impressed by the Nemesis’ performance that we hardly even noticed the noise.

The Nemesis is proof that single-core machines can still exhibit some superiority over the up-and-coming dual-cores (including our very own Dream Machine). Still, we’d rather have the flexibility and power multi-core offers than the blazing-fast single-core performance you get with the Nemesis.

But we’ve got to give Monarch’s PC grudging respect. If we’re going to get aced at our own game, losing to a machine as nice as the Nemesis takes some of the sting out of it.
—TAE K. KIM

+ SAMUEL L. JACKSON: An FX-57, two GeForce 7800 GTX videocards in SLI, and Asus' SLI cardless-configuration mobo? You had us at "hello."

- MICHAEL JACKSON: Extremely expensive.

Month reviewed: September 2005
Verdict: 9 Kick Ass
URL: www.monarchcomputer.com