The joy of a Windows-based PC is that you’re free to fiddle around with the hardware as much as you want – something Enspire has taken advantage of with its latest creation.
Pacstar submitted our first quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700 PC, but that runs the stock speed of 2.66GHz. Enspire has taken the same CPU and pushed it to run at Pentium 4-like clock speeds – resulting in a massive 3.73GHz. No prizes for guessing that this is the fastest PC we’ve ever seen, with scores like 3.36 for our stressful multitasking test. This PC is, in demonstrable terms, up to three times faster than a top-end PC of a year ago. Granted, it costs about three times as much, but this is performance the likes of which we won’t see for some time from off-the-shelf systems. This is, of course, the main point of overclocking: to get something now that you’d otherwise have to wait a long time for.
It’s beautifully made, too. The next time a Mac user with a chip on their shoulder starts boasting how their massively expensive powerful Mac looks so good compared to PCs, wave a picture of this under their faces (it’s also almost half the price and 25 percent faster than a Dual Xeon Mac Pro Work Station). The Silverstone Temjin TJ07 Super Tower is the ultimate in monolithic, minimalist cool but still has a window in the side to let you see the impressive innards. We were mightily impressed with the cabling and cooling tube placement but then learned that Enspire considered this to be a prototype and that the final model ‘won’t look so messy’. Enspire also told us that the system will ship with water-cooled graphics cards (costing $350 extra) so expect the Herculean power of the two 8800 GTXs to be enhanced as well.
As it was, the 8800 GTXs with their combined 1536MB of GDDR3 RAM and 256 stream processors ran at stock speeds. But with CPU limitations significantly raised, the scores from our test games were astronomic. In our highest standard tests, the Lightspeed scored 193fps and 98fps in Far Cry and Call of Duty 2 respectively. Our Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion test broke the 100fps barrier, and the Company of Heroes benchmark returned a score of 129fps. Even upping the resolution to 2048 x 1536 and forcing every extra effect possible didn’t cause Oblivion to run at less than 90fps.
Part of the multi-application speed comes from the striped pair of 10,000rpm 74GB Western Digital Raptor hard disks. Enspire sensibly adds a third 500GB hard disk to boost storage. If you still want more you can add more from the Enspire Digital online configurator. You might also want to convert the one-year, onsite warranty to three years for $230.
The noise is kept to a minimum. When idle, the fans hum fairly unobtrusively, and extended gaming sessions only raise this to a slightly louder level – it puts many budget PCs we see to shame.
Other notable features include an Creative X-Fi sound card and 10 USB ports – four of them being at the front. FireWire is catered for, as is 7.1 audio plus two Gigabit Ethernet ports. PS/2 ports are also included which will please people adding older peripherals. S/PDIF out is included, as well as an 18x Pioneer DVD writer which supports dual-layer and DVD-RAM writing. Vista Ultimate will be included and we expect Nvidia to have sorted out its Vista drivers by the time you read this, so there shouldn’t be any game performance issues.
Machines like this aren’t for everyone, and putting a value for money score on the Lightspeed is like putting a price on a Fabergé egg; you can’t buy this anywhere else. And as for a performance score, it’s a shame we can’t go up to seven stars.
