Posted 11/02/09 at 11:01:00 AM by Paul Lilly

Let's be realistic for a moment. Few would classify Maingear's new Shift series as supercomputers for the homestead, but we'll give Maingear this much: these new PCs pack a punch.

"The Shift bucks the trend of plastic, bloated, commodity PCs. It's a statement of our commitment to performance, reliability, and support," said Wallace Santos, CEO and Founder of Maingear. "Featuring vertical airflow, all the cooling necessary for today's high performance, and backed by the best technical support team in the business, Maingear is committed to maintaining our lead in the market."

The configurable PCs come built around your choice of Intel's P55 or X58 platform and come with a Core i7 800 series or 900 series CPU. DDR3 memory options include up to 8GB on the P55 platform, or up to 24GB in the X58 setup. You can choose from a plethora of videocards culminating in a pair of dual-GPU GTX 295s, and for storage duties, Maingear will slap up to 6 mechanical or 12 SSD drives into your rig. Other options include Blu-ray, liquid cooling, Razer peripherals, Killer NIC Xeno Pro card, and of course Windows 7.

Maingear promises each Shift system will ship with no bloatware, and they've all been tuned to take advantage of GPGPU computing.

The new PCs are available now starting at $2,200 (P55) and $2,600 (X58). In Q4, Maingear says it will add a Xeon-based setup with Nvidia's Quadro graphics to the lineup.

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Posted 09/22/09 at 08:12:42 AM by Paul Lilly

If you've ever dreamed about owning a supercomputer, SGI has your back. During the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) that kicked off today and runs until Thursday, SGI introduced what it describes as a "personal supercomputer" called the Octane III. More than just marketing hype, the Octane III comes ready to accommodate up to 80 high-performance cores and just shy of 1TB of memory.

"This new product takes high-performance computing to a new level by combining the immense power and performance capabilities of a high-performance deskside cluster with the portability and usability of a workstation," SGI said in a statement. "The Octane III is uniquely suited for workplace environments and supports a vast range of distributed technical computing applications."

The Octane III will ship with a pre-installed platform with support for several HPC applications, including fluid dynamics, quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, CAD, and a bunch of other geeky stuff that has nothing to do with running Crysis or gaming in general.

Cost of entry will start at around $8,000.

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