AVADirect Dishes Up Dual Six-Core Xeon System for Gamers
AVADirect Dishes Up Dual Six-Core Xeon System for Gamers
Posted 05/10/2010 at 4:49am
| by Paul Lilly
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When we think of high end gaming machines, Intel's Xeon processors aren't the first chips that come to mind, but that doesn't mean we'd turn our noses up at a monster setup with not one, but two six-core Xeon 5600 chips. That's exactly what AVADirect delivers in its new custom hybrid gaming system / workstation setup built for both work and play.
If you don't need quite that level of performance, you can drop down to a mere quad-core Xeon chip, but where's the fun in that? As with most boutique system builders, you can choose from a wide variety of components, including up to 48GB of DDR3 memory, up to FOUR freaking graphics, oodles of SSD and HDD options configurable in a RAID array, and just about everything else you can imagine. For a fee, AVADirect will go the extra mile however little or much you wish, including GPU overclocking, sound dampening your setup, slapping on a custom paint job, and spiral wrapping or looming custom colored cables.
All of these hardware options come jammed into an EVGA SR2 motherboard with support for SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0, and the whole thing is shoved into a Lian Li Armorsuit PC-P80 tower chassis, which are about the only two components that can't be swapped.
Pricing starts at a little more than $4,000 and can quickly reach stratospheric levels when fully decked out.
Image Credit: AVADirect
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SpeakerGeek
June 20, 2010 at 4:35pm
Think about it in terms of bandwidth. This class of processor has built in memory and pci express controllers. So using 2 of them should double the pci express and memory bandwidth. This increased bandwidth should cause a drastic increase in graphics performance using 4 high performance GPUs. As far as the OS is concerned, this thing is really expensive, if you are buying it, you can afford a Windows 7 Pro upgrade. Look for this machine, or one similar, to set the bar for benchmarking.
dragonbif
May 14, 2010 at 6:26pm
The default OS is Windows 7 Home Prem. What they do not tell you is unless you get Windows 7 Pro, Enterprise or Ultimate you are just burning money on this thing.
"While all Editions of Windows 7 can support multiple core CPUs, only Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate, and Enterprise can support DUAL processors."
Quote from Microsoft's 6292A.
In other words Home Prem will work if you have 2 CPUs but it will not take advatage of it and use it correctly.
They also have 32bit Windows as an option even if you have 48GB of memory selected.
mralexosborn
May 10, 2010 at 2:56pm
Yeah, they talked about it on the podcast a couple weeks back. Only the Xeon processors allow you to use two CPUs on a motherboard.
themohawkadmin
May 10, 2010 at 1:47pm
It's not that Xeons are bad for gaming; they are just built differently and the differences don't give them any gain in gaming. That said, it doesn't hinder them either. I use 2 Dual-Core Xeons @ 2.6Ghz and a GTX 285 and my rig benches within 1-2% of my friend's 2.6Ghz Core i5 w/ GTX 285 (turbo boost disabled on both rigs).
That said, it would make sense to just use 2 Core i7 980X cpu's since they would be cheaper and perform the same. I'm pretty sure the 980X has support for dual-cpu.
And why oh why would they use Value Ram?!!?
AntiHero
May 10, 2010 at 9:50am
Xeon processors suck for gaming. It would be like buyinga workstation card to game on, i sucks, plain and simple. Also, they only feature Kingston and Corsair value ram kits, which are mediocre kits at best, and suck at being overclocked. Also not to mention dual cpu systems cause more problems than they solve if you're using anything other than server software. Really, this is an overpriced pc for a gamer, and a slightly above normal price for a workstation, however it's only really good for the latter.
SpeakerGeek
June 20, 2010 at 4:43pm
Workstation GPUs suck for gaming because they are optimized for opengl, not directx. The Xeon processors are fine for gaming. I agree about the crappy memory, and it's ubsurdly expensive. It's still cool. though.
Talcum X
May 10, 2010 at 6:53am
I don't know how it will perform but someone had a wild hair to think this one up.
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