Altech’s Gameforce Mercenary reigned supreme on our A-List for several months and still offers great value and high-power, but this month Trinity International (TI) has finally toppled it.
TI’s cutting-edge system looks great in its iCute case. This offers slick-looking drive bay grille covers and some great cooling features. A 120mm blue-lit intake fan cools the hard disks from the front while a whopping 220mm fan is mounted on the side of the case for the rest of the system. There are no rear fans, but there are grilles and fittings for two 80mm units if required. It’s all mercifully quiet.
We specifically mention the cooling because there are some high-performance components inside: two 320GB Seagate hard disks run in a RAID0 configuration for speed, and there’s 2GB of DDR2 RAM and an Intel E6600 processor. This combination of these components generated a score of 1.47 in our benchmarks — almost 50 percent faster than our speedy reference PC from last year. It’s still 12 percent slower than the E6700-equipped Mercenary, but will keep even hardened encoders happy.
But where the Super Power draws away from the Altech is with its 8800 GTX DirectX 10 graphics card — the fastest you can buy. This will play all games in the foreseeable future at maximum resolution and detail settings — even on the bundled 1680 x 1050 22in LCD. Indeed, in our 1600 x 1200 Far Cry with HDR test, we saw an average frame rate of 107fps. The punishing Call of Duty 2 test, which is rarely playable at 1600 x 1200 with 4x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering, averaged 56.3fps — again, well playable.
The monitor itself comes from Chimei, and sports a 5ms response time. It’s bright and well lit (if a little plasticy looking) and playing games and watching films was a treat. The desktop icons and word processor text was also crisp and clear. Viewing angles in all directions were modest though. The keyboard and mouse are basic Microsoft wired offerings, but are accurate and comfortable. Other features include a very fast 18x DVD writer which also supports dual-layer writing and DVD-RAM. There’s also a Compro TV tuner which supports both analogue and digital TV, although the bundled software is rather basic and clunky.
If you want to upgrade, there’s space for an extra five drives (3.5 or 5.25in). Two 1x PCI-E slots are spare, as are two PCI slots. There’s no second graphics slot for SLI, but you won’t need it with a card like the 8800 GTX.
Connectivity options are good at the back with four USB 2 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, parallel, serial, six audio jacks and optical and coaxial S/PDIF out ports. At the front, four USB ports join two audio jacks, but regrettably, there is no FireWire.
A two-year RTB warranty is included and TI will include Windows Vista Basic with the system. At $3025 it’s a bargain and a great addition to the A-List.
