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.

Polywell Poly i680SLI-QX

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 16:08:23 -0500

Lately, we’ve been getting two kinds of systems for review: rigs overclocked to within an inch of their lives (or beyond) and those about as exciting as plain yogurt.

Polywell’s Poly i680SLI-QX comes from that ho-hum school of safe and sane computing. It’s L7 to the max, but that’s oddly comforting. Lately, we’ve been getting so many machines overclocked too far that the thought of a stock-clocked, boring box is refreshing. We’re just shell-shocked from seeing too many unstable machines that can POST but then spit up something pixilated and oozing at the first sign of a benchmark or application.

No need for a 1,000-watt power supply here; Polywell gives you two 700-watt power supplies.

Of course, calling the Poly i680SLI-QX a “boring” box shows you just how quickly we get jaded around here. This PC features Intel’s Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processor, a pair of 150GB WD Raptor 10,000rpm drives in RAID 0, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800, an EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard, and the pièce de résistance, a pair of XFX GeForce 8800 GTX cards in SLI. For most people, that’s fantasy PC hardware you read about, but never own. So maybe we take back what we said about this system being boring.

One of the top problems facing system builders and consumers today is getting a PSU that can drive all that hardware reliably. It’s become so critical that Nvidia and ATI are testing PSUs for compatibility with their products, and diverging from the approved list usually ends in disaster. Polywell’s solution to the PSU problem is certainly unique. The company sidesteps the issue by using not one, but two 700-watt FSP PSU units in the huge Cooler Master CM Stacker case. The FSP PSU is certified only for 7900 GTX cards in SLI, but by using two separate units, the load is likely so light that power won’t be an issue. It’s different, but we’d probably rather just see a high-end kilowatt PSU in there. One of the problems with using dual PSUs is that you can’t tap all the power of the second unit.

Polywell ejects Microsoft Vista from the configuration here. The company didn’t say why, but we suspect it decided to play it safe since 8800 drivers for Vista are still pretty sketchy.

Polywell also does an interesting trick with its drive configuration. Along with the two 150GB Raptors is a 320GB drive for backup—it’s a little small but certainly better than nothing.

A new self-contained waterblock and cooler from Asetek doesn’t require you to yank your mobo to remove the cooling.

Unfortunately, the Poly i680SLI-QX won’t set any records for performance. The last two desktop machines we reviewed packed the same hardware as the Poly, but their 2.66GHz CPUs were overclocked to 3.46GHz. While the Poly i680SLI-QX makes a chump out of our zero-point Athlon 64 FX-60 machine and any Pentium D or Athlon 64 proc, there’s just no way in hell it can pull down enough numbers to beat the competition. The benchmarks are very good, excellent almost, but against a 3.46GHz quad core it’s just an exercise in futility. Of course, as we noted above, there’s no risk of this machine suddenly crashing two years from now due to extended overclocking. We did experience problems with SYSmark, but the benchmark has been increasingly flaky for the last few months, which we can’t fault Polywell for.

So where does this leave the Poly i680SLI-QX? In a pretty good place, actually. The Maingear F131, with its similar hardware, smokes the Polywell, but it also costs about $2,000 more. That makes the Poly i680SLI-QX a pretty compelling machine, despite its benchmark deficit to the overclocked kids.

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Polywell X5800A-Extreme

Sassy black machine

Polywell Poly i680SLI-QX