Enspire may have stolen the thunder with regards to powerful PCs this month but quad-core power is still within the price range of us mere mortals, thanks to Pacstar.
Our first impressions were mixed. The EZCool Eragon case, with its glowing eyes, looked a bit tacky. We also weren’t sure about the plastic ‘tail’ which pops up at the back to reveal a fan underneath. However, we did like the pop-up media card reader at the front.
At the side is a quiet 220mm fan, but the stock Intel CPU cooler is horrendously loud – running at near maximum most of the time. During particularly intensive activity it even overheated – something which the cases’ digital readout informed us of.
Opening the front panel showed room for three more 5.25in drives. Only one DVD-writer is included but it supports 18x writing, dual-layer and DVD-RAM. There are also two external 3.5in drive bays free.
Two of the three hard disk bays are occupied with a 10,000rpm WD Raptor (for fast booting) and a 400GB Samsung drive for storage. 2GB of PC2-6400 RAM is installed and this, coupled with Intel’s 2.66GHz QX6700 quad-core CPU, stormed to a massive benchmark score of 1.95 overall. However, quad-core complicated the results: applications like CorelDRAW, Photoshop and Office offer little in the way of multi-threaded support, while encoding applications show larger performance boosts: our ProCoder test scored 2.00 and our 3DStudio Max test scored 1.98. However, hardcore multitasking benefits most as a score of 2.67 illustrates – that’s 167 percent faster than our ‘speedy’ reference PC. Amazing.
The 8800 GTS graphics card is a great choice as it makes all current games playable at full resolution and detail settings. In our 1600 x 1200 game benchmarks Far Cry averaged 76fps and Call of Duty 2 averaged 48fps. Its DirectX 10 compatibility will be a boon when compatible games finally appear (around Winter).
The motherboard has room for an extra graphics card, two PCI cards plus two 1x PCI-Express card. It’s good for connectivity with four USB 2 ports, FireWire, jacks for 7.1 audio, optical and coaxial S/PDIF out, serial and parallel ports. At the front are the usual two USB2 and two audio jacks.
The keyboard and mouse are adequate Microsoft offerings but the widescreen 20in LCD is a good Samsung model. The resolution of 1680 x 1050 gives you lots of desktop real-estate; it’s bright, well-lit and text looks very crisp. Colours were vibrant, so our HD video looked great and playing games was a treat. The 6ms response time meant lag was minimal.
It stacks up to a great system which is good value at $3999. Note though that the warranty is RTB only, though it is for two years. However, the noise and cooling are an issue as things stand, so it just misses out on an award.
