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Falcon Northwest Talon

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0600

When Falcon Northwest submitted its Talon PC to us instead of its top-gun Mach V, we didn’t think the machine stood a chance of taking down the spate of ripping-fast 4GHz Core i7 rigs we’ve seen in the last few months.

And we were right. But the point Falcon was trying to make with its Talon was that its machine could deliver 90 percent of the performance of those big LGA1366-based Core i7 rigs at half the cost, half the noise, and half the energy consumption. Impossible? We thought so.

But that was before we’d ever heard of ATI’s new Radeon HD 5970 card. Code-named Hemlock, this new card features not one, but two of the GPUs that power the Kick Ass Radeon HD 5870.

Falcon uses two of these cards in the Talon, for quad-GPU action, and pairs them with an LGA1156 Core i7-870 overclocked from its stock 2.93GHz to very stable 3.83GHz. We stress-tested the Falcon for more than 48 hours without a single crash.

For storage, Falcon tapped a pair of Intel’s 34nm X25-M 80GB SSDs. Bulk storage is left to a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint drive.

The 64-bit Windows 7 Pro–based Talon’s benchmark scores didn’t disappoint—but they didn’t send us swooning, either. The Talon beat our zero point, a Core i7-920 overclocked to 3.66GHz. We saw predictable results, with the Falcon faster in Premiere Pro CS3 and Photoshop CS3. Photoshop CS3 actually saw a performance delta of 19 percent, thanks to the SSDs in the Talon and the higher Turbo mode clocks. However, in ProShow and MainConcept, the Talon’s scores were closer to the zero point’s, but still faster. In gaming, pitting two dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 cards against a single Radeon HD 4870 X2 turned out as expected: with almost an 80 percent difference in frame rates. Even better, the CrossFire (or should we say QuadFire?) Radeon HD 5970s let you tick on 16x AA in Crysis with nary a drop in performance. Frankly, for folks with a single, 24-inch panel, these two cards are overkill (but feel free to experiment with three or more panels in the cards’ Eyefinity mode).

Now, what about those claims of taking on those 4GHz-plus Core i7 boxes? Falcon hit its target. It couldn’t beat the $9,000 Velocity Micro Raptor SE that we reviewed in December, but it was just 10 percent slower. The Raptor SE’s tri-SLI also held a 5 percent edge in Crysis, but we suspect that with this class of machine, Crysis is quickly being limited by the CPU. Amazingly, the Talon managed to surpass the Windows Vista–based AVADirect machine we reviewed in our Holiday issue, even though the latter’s Core i7 was clocked up to 4.4GHz.

Even more amazing, the Talon could hold its own against machines that are almost twice as pricey, while being incredibly quiet. Not HTPC quiet, but you’d be unlikely to identify this machine as an all-out gaming rig judging by the sound output. In power consumption, the Falcon peaked at about 500 watts—half as much as the AVADirect machine.

The Talon is not the most powerful machine we’ve ever tested, but it still gets our approval for being fast, freakishly quiet, and even energy efficient. Heck, it’ll even save you a few thousand bucks, to boot.

Velocity Micro Raptor Signature Edition

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:45:16 -0600

First Windows 7 rig makes a smashingly fast, and pricey, debut

It is, perhaps, fitting that Velocity Micro’s new rig is called a Raptor.

That’s because anyone who has ever seen the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor in person and on afterburner knows just how overkill the F-22 is.

The same can be said of Velocity Micro’s Raptor Signature Edition. With people overjoyed just to have a $99 Athlon II X4 620, Velocity Micro decided to go shock-and-awe on the spec lists—and the wallet.

First up is Intel’s stellar Core i7-975 Extreme Edition. With a stock speed of 3.33GHz, Velocity Micro uses a custom CoolIt Domino ALC to get the processor to a very stable 4.2GHz. To “balance” this $1,000 CPU, Velocity Micro throws in probably $1,500 in GPUs in the form of three EVGA GeForce GTX 285s. Still not impressed? How about four SLC-based Intel X25-E Extreme 64GB SSD drives in RAID 0?

Mind you, these are not the pedestrian X25-M consumer drives; they’re enterprise-class drives that offer more than twice the write performance of the X-25M version and peg the read speeds at the SATA 3Gb/s limit. If you’re afraid of a four-drive RAID 0, you might feel better that the X25-E’s are designed for server use and should have 10 times the life of a consumer drive.

Quad-core, quad SSDs, and tri-SLI make the Raptor SE one fast--and expensive--machine.

Storage is handled by a single 1.5TB Seagate and two optical drives, one a Blu-ray burner. The entire rig is based on EVGA’s X58 SLI Classified motherboard. RAM is left to 6GB of Kingston DDR3/1600 modules. And, of course, there’s Windows 7 Ultimate in 64-bit mode, to boot. We’ve been taking a drubbing from the Mac fanatics for some time over Vista, but Win7 fixes all that and may even plant a Windows logo’d boot up OSX’s rear.

As much love as we have for Win7, it made comparisons with other systems difficult—up to now all the desktops we’ve reviewed have used Vista. On the other hand, the comparisons are valid as a PC purchased four months ago is likely still running Vista. If you buy into that line of reasoning, we can tell you that the Raptor SE is now the benchmark king in five of our six benchmarks. For a more direct comparison, we looked at the numbers from our September Dream Machines, which ran Windows 7, and as expected, those three boxes couldn’t touch the Raptor SE. For example, our midrange Core i7 Dream Machine (our new desktop zero point) puts out 37fps in Crysis at 1920x1200—the Velocity Micro pushes 70fps. The Raptor SE turns in no less than double-digit percentage gains in every test.

So, what’s the problem? Just like the F-22, which just got its ticket punched by a penny-pinching Pentagon and Congress—the price. At $9000, this is one of the most expensive rigs we’ve ever tested. With the 64GB X25-E drives each costing $800, a $1,000 CPU, and $1,500 in GPUs, the stratospheric price of the Raptor SE is enough to make even a DoD procurement clerk with use of the never-ending government Visa card cringe.

Still, we understand the need to be on top of the benchmarks, and respect that. We just wish it didn’t have to cost as much as a small nation’s GDP.

CyberPower Gamer Xtreme 3200

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:45:40 -0500

Get a Nehalem and have cash left over

Even we have to admit that in this economy, you have to be thankful if you’re not still driving a Pentium 4 rig. Still, for budget buyers today, the choice usually doesn’t get much better than a dual-core machine that takes overnight to encode video and a GPU that can’t push pixels downhill.

Fortunately, it’s no Pentium Dual-Core or Celeron that CyberPower opts to stick you with. Instead, CyberPower reached into its parts bin for Intel’s brand-new, budget badass: the $200 2.66GHz Core i5-750. This chip is like Chuck Norris in a bar fight: It not only wipes the floor with Phenom II X4, it commits a little fratricide against its Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Duo siblings, too.

To this Two-Buck Chuck, CyberPower adds what is definitely not a budget part: Nvidia’s fastest videocard in the form of EVGA’s GeForce GTX 295. At the foundation is Gigabyte’s new GA-P55-UD5 and 4GB of Kingston DDR3/1600. Storage is left to a 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda and a Samsung 22x DVD burner. A Cooler Master V8 cooler and Scout case complete the package.

The CyberPower Gamer Xtreme 3200 gives you damn-near the performance of machines that cost two or three times the price.

How does it do? Not bad. Against our 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad/SLI GeForce 8800 GTX machine it’s a slaughter, of course. But even compared to its Core i7 contemporaries, the CyberPower holds its own. It’s a bit slower, but for the money, it’s a solid performer.

Compared to other budget machines that we’ve reviewed in the last few months, the CyberPower gives you nearly the same performance for about half the price. You can thank the fact that CyberPower pushed the 2.66GHz Core i5 up to 3.35GHz. Clock speeds alone don’t always pay off, though. The reliance on a single 1.5TB Barracuda, as fast as it is, can’t compare to SSD or RAID 0 configurations on anything that hits the drives a lot. And what about our Budget Surplus machine that the editors themselves configured and built in our September issue? How does this $1,600 CyberPower do against our $1,400 Dream Machine? First, a mea culpa: We didn’t include the price of the OS for our Budget Surplus rig because Windows 7 wasn’t available yet, so the two are really on cost parity once an OS is included.

While performance comparisons are expected, our Budget Surplus rig’s use of Windows 7 RC makes head-to-head numbers unfair. So we’ll base our criticism squarely on the configuration and declare… a tie. Our Budget Surplus featured a single Radeon HD 4870 X2. This elderly dual-GPU card definitely takes a back seat to the GeForce 295 GTX, but it’s also quite a bit cheaper, too. Both systems featured the same 1.5TB Barracuda drive and similar-speed burners, so storage isn’t the difference.

What it comes down to is where you want to go. The CyberPower is likely a slightly better gaming rig thanks to the faster graphics card, but our Budget Surplus gives you the option of upgrading to a six-core Gulftown next year. Then again, if you’re looking at $1,500 rigs, are you really going to buy a $1,000 CPU early next year? No.

When all is said and done, the Cyber-Power is definitely one of the best budget rigs we’ve seen.

Digital Storm 950Si

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:00:00 -0500

This sleek black rig brings quad SLI and Core i7 goodness

If you doubt the existence of mirror universes that are almost the same except for minor changes, Digital Storm’s 950Si rig could make a believer out of you.

The 950Si is that similar to Maingear’s Kick Ass Award–winning ePhex that we reviewed in August, albeit with some slight differences. For instance, the ePhex’s all-white enclosure was a Silverstone TJ10, while the 950Si uses a nearly all-black TJ09.

In graphics, the 950Si features dual EVGA GeForce GTX 295 cards while Maingear opted for three GeForce GTX 285 cards. Both rigs sport Intel’s top proc—the Core i7 975 Extreme Edition at 4GHz—but get there differently. Digital Storm does a straight multiplier overclock of 31x133MHz base clock to get to 4.1GHz. Maingear preferred a 21x multiplier with a 160MHz base clock to get to 4GHz.

Even in SSDs there’s a similar-but-different feel. Maingear tapped two Intel 80GB X-25M drives; Digital Storm opted for two of Corsair’s 64GB M64 SSDs.

The 950Si is surprisingly quiet for the amount of hardware packed inside.

Our performance tests yielded a few surprises. The water-cooled 4.1GHz Core i7 runs circles, squares, and heptagons around our now-ancient Core 2 Quad zero-point. But good against a Core 2 is one thing; good against another Core i7, that’s something else.

When compared with Maingear’s ePhex, the 950Si was able to grab two benchmark crowns by nudging the ePhex aside in the multithread-lovin’ Main Concept Reference and ProShow Producer tests. But then things got a little odd. Despite its slightly higher clocks (4.1GHz vs. 4GHz), the 950Si actually fell to the ePhex in Photoshop CS3 and Premiere Pro CS3 by about eight percent and 10 percent, respectively. We’re not sure why, but perhaps it’s the result of the higher QPI from the bclock overclock versus the straight multiplier overclock. Or perhaps it’s the RAM. Although we have not known this to impact performance, the ePhex packed 12GB of Kingston DDR3/1600 while the 950Si loads up with a lean 6GB of Mushkin DDR/1600.

The clash of the titans came in gaming, where it was the 950Si’s quad SLI (two dual-GPU GTX 295 cards) against the ePhex’s tri SLI (three GTX 285s). The winner? Tri SLI by a decision. While the ePhex hammered out a stunning 70fps in Crysis, the 950Si’s 65fps is nothing to sneeze at, either. Why wouldn’t four GPUs—albeit clocked lower—beat three? Crysis doesn’t really stress more than three GPUs, so the fourth is there for a ride. There’s also some overhead to having four GPUs, slightly more than there is even with three.

The real oddity was in Unreal Tournament 3.

Instead of the 200fps that we expected, the 950Si spit out a puzzling 115fps. That’s way off the mark for this much hardware. What’s the problem? We’re not sure, but as a sanity check, we also ran 3DMark Vantage’s GPU test on the “extreme” setting and found the 950Si on par with the ePhex, so we’re not too worried about the UT3 performance. However, one final test using Far Cry 2 on Ultra High settings showed the 950Si running about 27 percent slower than the ePhex. Mind you, that still amounts to an excellent 87fps at 1920x1200, but the Maingear rig was clearly the faster of the two.

One area where the 950Si clearly wins, though, is in price. At nearly $2,000 less than the ePhex, the 950Si is more than 30 percent cheaper. But is that really what a buyer who steps into this class of hardware is looking for? In today’s economy, perhaps. Still, the 950Si is a respectable machine, it’s just not the fastest thing out there.

Apple iPhone 3GS

Will Smith — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:40:00 -0500

Finally, a no-compromises smartphone suitable for mass consumption

Once upon a time, I dismissed the iPhone as a wannabe smartphone, lacking the key features that truly warranted that label. Since I wrote that column about two years ago, Apple has gone on a feature-adding rampage—adding push email, support for Exchange servers, third-party applications, and a veritable alphabet soup of new acronyms (GPS, MMS, and 3G, for starters). Two years into the iPhone era, the device is so much more than a phone with an iPod attached— it’s an instant-on, always-connected, pocket-sized computer.

On paper, the 3GS doesn’t seem like a major upgrade from the previous-generation iPhone, especially when you consider that many of the bullet points on the 3GS’s feature list came to older iPhones in the form of the 3.0 firmware release. And at first glance, even the new 3GS-exclusive features—a faster CPU, more memory, a more capable GPU, faster network connectivity, a higher-resolution camera that can finally shoot video, voice control for key features, and a compass—seem like a mixture of unsexy, incremental, shoulda-been-there-already features, and just plain meh. Worse, some of the features require carrier support, so things like MMS messages, higher-speed HSPDA support, and tethering won’t be available in the United States until AT&T deigns to support them.

The iPhone 3GS brings a faster CPU, more memory, and faster download speeds to Apple's do-everything wonder-phone.

But when you actually sit down and use the phone, the seemingly minor hardware tweaks bring a substantial performance boost to the phone. The OS is snappier, apps load noticeably faster, and the out-of-memory crashes that plagued Safari with earlier versions of the iPhone seem to be a thing of the past. The 3GS nearly halved the load times for some particularly slow-loading apps in my side-by-side testing with the 3G version. Depending on the way you use your phone and the apps you use, you could experience a substantial performance boost. I even find myself wiping finger grease off the phone less frequently, thanks to the new fingerprint-resistant coating that Apple uses on the phone’s glass touch screen.

While many of the new software features are also available to owners of older iPhones, I’d be remiss not to mention them. On the software front, the 3GS offers all the goodness of the 3.0 software update—phone-wide search, push notifications for apps, the voice recorder app, and a bunch of other smaller improvements.

In my admittedly unscientific battery-life tests, the iPhone 3GS seemed to have a shorter run than the first iPhone in common usage, although it still outperformed the 3G. The 3GS has real battery-life problems when you run CPU-intensive apps, like the video camera or most games. In the gaming test, the 3GS battery drained faster than a 3G. I have yet to run out of juice before the end of the day, but this is definitely a phone that requires a recharge after a full day of use.

Where does that leave the iPhone 3GS? For users of the original iPhone, it’s a great upgrade. Owners of the 3G should probably wait and see what Apple has planned for next year before they make the upgrade. And even if you have a moral objection to Apple, you have to be excited that the iPhone’s success has forced formerly moribund carriers and hardware manufacturers to innovate again, which is good news for anyone with a cell phone.

TriGem Averatec 22-inch All-in-One PC

Michael Brown — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:30:00 -0500

Looking for a smart TV?

When we began covering all-in-one PCs, we decided we wouldn’t benchmark them because they’re designed for quiet utility, not drag racing. But the Dell XPS One 24 we reviewed in May proved that an all-in-one could hang with the hot rods, so we decided to make that machine our all-in-one zero-point. We imagine Averatec would prefer we go back to our old ways.

On the outside, the Averatec looks very much like an iMac wrapped in shiny black plastic. Inside you’ll find a mixture of desktop and notebook components that explain why the machine is priced $600 less than Apple’s cheapest 24-inch iMac and a cool grand less than Dell’s 24-inch XPS One. Averatec reached far down Intel’s desktop CPU line to pick a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo E4600. It did the same for graphics, tapping Nvidia’s two-year-old GeForce 8400M GS mobile GPU. This GPU has just 16 shader processors, runs at a mild 400MHz, and has a narrow 64-bit interface to 256MB of memory. It drives the integrated display at its native resolution of 1680x1050, and there’s a DVI port in back if you want to connect a second monitor.

The Averatec All-in-One is a good value if you're looking for a midsize TV that can handle light productivity apps and access the Internet.

The system has 3GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory, a 500GB desktop hard drive, and an integrated AVerMedia A317 hybrid digital/analog TV tuner card. Audio is handled by Realtek’s ALC888. The chassis has stereo speakers, but there’s a S/PDIF port in the back if you want to connect to an A/V receiver or home-theater-in-a-box system. There’s a gigabit LAN port, but wireless networking is limited to 802.11a/b/g.

As with Dell’s machine, Averatec tucks the power supply inside the chassis, so you don’t have to worry about hiding a power brick as you do with HP’s TouchSmart series. This design decision and the presence of a desktop CPU increases the system’s cooling requirements, which are handled passively with heat pipes and vents and actively with a 7cm chassis fan. We found the Averatec to be slightly louder than HP’s all-but-silent TouchSmart IQ506t, but quieter than Dell’s whiney XPS One.

The wireless keyboard is too mushy for our taste, but it does have one cool feature: You can stash the included remote control inside it. The otherwise unremarkable wireless mouse has an extremely annoying habit of falling asleep after just a few minutes of activity, refusing to come back to life until you jiggle it back and forth for several seconds.

Nobody buys an all-in-one for gaming, so we don’t bother running those benchmarks. We do, however, think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect machines in this class to be competent at photo and video editing. The Averatec turned in respectable performance in Photoshop, but the canyonesque gaps in its other benchmark scores reduce it to the level of a glorified TV.

Maingear ePhex

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:00:37 -0500

It's like an early dream machine

It’s become a cliché in hardware reviews to call a PC “the fastest machine we’ve ever seen,” but there are no better words to describe Maingear’s ePhex.

It truly is the fastest machine we’ve ever seen. And you would expect that from a parts list that looks like someone just checked the “bestest” box before clicking the buy button.

Peep these specs: Intel’s new Core i7-975 Extreme Edition CPU. This new CPU may seem like it’s just 133MHz faster than the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition CPU, but it’s actually a new stepping of the core that enhances overclocking. Maingear overclocks the chip from 3.33GHz to a very stable 4GHz. To the new i7, Maingear adds 12GB of Kingston DDR3/1600 on the Asus Rampage II Extreme board, a 2TB Western Digital drive, two Intel 80GB X25-M SSDs in RAID 0, and not two, but three GeForce GTX 285 cards in tri-SLI. To keep it all running, Maingear water cools all three GPUs and the CPU, and then tosses in a 1,200 watt PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool PSU.

The package is stunningly fast, as you can imagine. The majority of our benchmark records, surprisingly, have been held by a Velocity Micro 3.66GHz Core i7 machine that we reviewed late last year. That’s an amazing feat in itself, but the Maingear box not only bumped the Velocity Micro from the top spot, it set new records in every single benchmark. Premiere Pro CS3? Fastest. Photoshop CS3? Fastest. ProShow Producer? Fastest. MainConcept? Fastest. UT3? You get the picture. The most impressive scores were perhaps in Crysis. We run the CPU bench section of this punishing game because it’s closest to an in-game experience, but we’ve long wondered if it’s been the CPU that’s shackled performance. We haven’t seen the needle move past 54fps in months—even with tri-SLI machines we’ve reviewed previously. The Maingear’s water-cooled GPUs spiked up to 70fps at 1920x1200 resolution with quality set to Very High. With 16x AA enabled, the rig’s scores dip to just 59fps.

Look out, there's a new benchmark sheriff in town.

Needless to say, it’s impressive when a machine captures every single benchmark record. Compared to last month’s Polywell Core i7 machine (overclocked to 3.6GHz), the Maingear represents well, turning in scores from 20 to 68 percent faster than the Polywell rig. We’d be remiss, however, if we didn’t point out that the Polywell cost $5,000 less. In an age when people are happy to scrape pennies together to buy a netbook, that kind of savings is nothing to sneeze at.

Performance aside, the Maingear’s not perfect. The paint job was good but far from flawless. We’ve seen much better work from the likes of Smooth Creations or Falcon Northwest. There were just enough blems that someone who put out $8K might be bummed. And even with the water-cooled components, the Maingear is quite audible under long, heavy loads. Part of that comes from the Turbo-Cool PSU, which sounds like an F-15 on afterburners, but the fact is, keeping this much hardware cool and running reliably can’t be done silently.

The machine was definitely reliable. Adrenaline junkies might wonder why Maingear didn’t push it to, say, 4.5GHz, but we demand stability. We put the box through an overnight Prime95 run and it never crashed. Likewise, we subjected it to a burn-in using a wickedly mean double-secret Intel utility and the machine ran rock solid.

So, if you’re able to swallow the price and the noise, you’re unlikely to find a faster machine today.

Polywell X5800A-Extreme

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:45:43 -0500

Sassy black machine

We’ve seen systems with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) before, but no vendor has been sassy enough to break from the de rigueur SATA VelociRaptor or SSD drives in favor of the tech—until now.

Of course, this is Polywell’s M.O.—not content to do things like any other system vendor, Polywell usually tucks in a curve ball to brush you off home plate when you don’t expect it. Sometimes Polywell’s pitch doesn’t work (think really nice $5,000 gaming rig with an $8 keyboard and mouse), but time we were intrigued with its 300 gigabytes of RAID 0, 15,000rpm, connected using SAS. The onboard SAS support in the Asus P6T Deluxe mobo achieved sequential read speeds of about 192MB/s with 6.8ms access times—that’s purty durn good considering that our VelociRaptor-equipped systems see roughly 166MB/s reads with about 7+ms access times.

Elsewhere, Polywell plays it safe and sane: an Intel Core i7 clocked up to 3.66GHz on air and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 card along with 6GB of DDR3 at 1,450MHz and an LG Blu-ray drive stuffed into an Antec 900 case make it a well-rounded rig—albeit a bit bland.

A little boring, but fast nonetheless.

In the performance curve, the X5800A-Extreme is definitely fast, but not quite where we expected it to land. Compared to all of the other Core i7 rigs we’ve reviewed, the X5800A-Extreme is a mix. The benchmark records for Premiere Pro CS3, ProShow Producer, and MainConcept Reference are still, amazingly, held by Velocity Micro’s Raptor Z90 that we reviewed in the Holiday 2008 issue. The Polywell is faster than the 3.33GHz Falcon Northwest box (reviewed in May 2009) in Premiere Pro CS3 and Photoshop CS3, but is tied with the Falcoln in ProShow Producer. The Polywell also outscores the 2.93GHz i7 Gateway (reviewed in April 2009) in Premiere and MainConcept but again loses in ProShow Producer. Why the odd mix of scores? We’re not exactly sure but it’s possible the Hyper-Threading plus quad-core i7 is to blame. We’ve seen unpredictable results on occasion with the new Intel chip. But since our scores are the result of an average of three test runs, we’re at a bit of a loss.

In gaming, the fearsome multi-GPU GeForce GTX 295 turns in an admirable performance. The X5800A-Extreme’s 42fps make it faster than other PCs equipped with just a single card, including the Radeon HD 4870 X2-based Gateway rig. And in Unreal Tournament 3, we actually saw Polywell’s X5800A-Extreme take the benchmark crown with its 172fps. While that may not sound like much, it’s a higher score than SLI, CrossFire, and Tri-SLI machines have produced. Granted, UT3’s aging engine has rapidly turned into a CPU test these days.

The best news is the price. Polywell prices the rig at $3,300, which makes it a pretty decent deal for the amount of hardware you get. It’s not quite as budget as Gateway’s FX6800 i7 rig with its Intel SSD, but the Polywell X5800A-Extreme is a competent machine that doesn’t make too many apologies.