Acer Aspire Predator

A good machine, the Predator delivers solid performance for its price; a little reconfiguring could wonders, however.
Acer's Aspire Predator is a peculiar power desktop. We see this particular configuration more as a sturdy base with room to grow than a power PC in its own right; a little more detail work on its guts could push it toward the top of the category.


Our test configuration (G7700-UQ9550A) ships with an Intel Core 2 Quad 9550 processor (stock-clocked at 2.83 GHz); 8GB of DDR2 (800 MHz) memory; and 1.92 terabytes of total storage, courtesy of three 640GB, 7200-rpm Western Digital Caviar hard drives. The system also features a single nVidia 9800GTX graphics board to power games and CUDA-enabled applications, along with separate DVD-writing and DVD-ROM optical drives. This Predator's price of $2199 (as of December 3, 2008) doesn't include Acer's matching $400 24-inch wide-screen G24 display, but you do get two awesome peripherals bundled in for the price: Logitech's G11 keyboard and G5 gaming mouse.
We love the Predator's exterior design, accented with stealth-fighter-like lines in metallic-orange. But the proprietary nature of its insides--complete with more plastic coverings than we ever needed to see--could make upgrading a frustrating situation. Given the lack of available 5.25-inch bay coverings on the case's front, you can't add more 5.25-inch devices to that section of the chassis. However, the four hot-swappable hard drive bays at the lower front of the machine (behind a lit-up, hinged door), redeems that shortcoming a bit.
Still inside the case, why is Acer liquid-cooling its quad-core processor without overclocking it whatsoever? If "acoustics" is the only answer, we frown: You can have a quiet and fast rig with liquid cooling, so there's no need to ignore the potential benefits of an overclocked processor. More frustrating still is that the system's Worldbench 6 score of 122 isn't exactly chart-topping. A little factory-side CPU tweaking could have gone a long way.
The aging nVidia 9800 GTX video card delivers acceptable (again, not stellar) performance; on the other hand, the Aspire Predator has two free PCI Express x16 slots for a dramatic degree of upgradability

Polywell Poly X4800-EXTREME

Expensive desktop provides knock-your-socks-off performance and lots of rear-port connectivity.
Polywell certainly named this power desktop compute correctly. Its 3.2-GHz Core 2 X9770 CPU is Intel s current state-of-the-art Extreme (overclockable) chip, which means that this is an extremely fast desktop. At $4799 (as of August 8, 2008), it's also extremely expensive. Then again, no one ever said state-of-the-art would be cheap; the X9770 CPU alone costs nearly$1500 ; the equally fresh-from-the-mint MSI nVidia GeForce GTX280 graphics card, abou$500and the 4GB of DDR3 1600 memory goes for nearly as much. But the steep cash outlay that's called for buys you a knock-your-socks-off WorldBench 6 score of 141, as well as a gaming experience of 207 to 266 frames per second. Extremely fast indeed.
Would You Buy This?
Part of the X4800-Extreme's excellent performance is due to a hard-drive setup we're beginning to see often on the power chart--pairs of 10,000-rpm, 300GB Western Digital WD3000GLFS VelociRaptor hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration. Not only are these 2.5-inch models mounted on 3.5-inch adapter sleds (as Western Digital calls them), they're energy-efficient. The sleds function as giant heat sinks that work so well that the drives are nearly cool to the touch even when in heavy use.
The X4800-Extreme is built around an extremely capable Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 motherboard with the most comprehensive array of rear-panel connections that I've ever seen in a PC. Besides a whopping eight USB 2.0 ports, the machine has both normal and 4-pin (mini) FireWire ports, optical and coaxial S/PDIF audio-out, six analog audio (7.1), and two gigabit ethernet ports. It also has motherboard headers for a pair of 2-port eSATA rear-slot breakout panels.
The X4800-Extreme's midtower case is sturdy and roomy, with flip and slide levers that let you swap in expansion cards and drive bays easily. Even so, the case setup is not as impressive as recently reviewed desktops from Xi Computers and Cerise Computers; both of those models mount power supplies at the bottom of the case for better stability, while the Poly X4800-Extreme mounts its 1000-watt Sparkle Power Magna 1000 power supply at the top.
The bundled Logitech 650 wireless mouse and keyboard were both comfortable to use. The Polywell-labeled Acer 2416 24-inch wide-screen LCD'spicture was also easy on the eyes, but I found the silverish bezel a little distracting. Personally, I wish they'd matched the case with a black bezel.
That said, the X4800-Extreme is about power, not style. For sheer performance, it has no equal on the chart.

SOURCE:www.pcworld.com

Gateway FX6800-01E

Gateway has put all the bells and whistles on its FX6800-01e desktop--it's either a killer valu PCor an inexpensive power PC, take your pick. No matter what you call it, this system offers compelling performance for its price. Though it isn't the all-out best value PC for its $1250 price tag, the FX6800-01e did deliver near tip-top results, even in the current-generation games we threw at it.

The system includes a 2.66-GHz Core i7 920 processor (part of Intel's top CPU line) plus 3GB of DDR3-1333 memory. Joining that powerful combination is a 750GB Seagate hard drive--not quite as expansive as, say, the 1.5 terabytes of space on Polywell's MiniBox 780G-94, but enough to accommodate all the data you need to store.
The single ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card did an exceptional job of producing playable frame rates for all the games we tested, including an average of 51 frames per second on Unreal Tournament 3 (2560 by 2100 resolution, high quality) and 46 fps on Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (2560 by 2100 resolution, high quality). Only the Maingear Dash, which uses two of the same cards in a CrossFire setup, surpassed this Gateway. The Dash also beat out the FX6800-01e on our WorldBench 6 benchmark, though by a scant two points, 117 to 115. (The fact that the Dash's Phenom II X4 940 processor is clocked 0.34 GHz higher than the FX6800-01e's CPU and that the Dash comes with an additional gigabyte of memory likely factored into the results, as well.)
This Gateway's peripheral offerings are generic, but at least they're boring with style. The two-button mouse is glossy black with a nice orange trim, and the keyboard uses half-size buttons and orange accents to spice up the otherwise drab functionality. We give the company credit for at least making the input devices fit the FX6800-01e's aesthetic theme. As for the PC's connections, eight USB ports grace the front and rear of the case. The two eSATA ports, single FireWire 400 port, on-board 5.1 surround sound, and front-panel media card reader are strong additions to the system, too, but we would have appreciated seeing at least one next-generation connector, such as DisplayPort or HDMI.
We love the FX6800-01e's case. It's a beautiful mix of glossy paneling and orange highlights that suggests a gaming PCmore than it does a value desktop. The front CD bays are stealthily tucked behind clearly labeled paneling, and the included media card reader pops up and down out of the top of the chassis. Cooler still, the top panel on the case's front doubles as a touch-button controller for the system itself: You can skip music tracks and adjust the volume by poking the front of your PC, almost eliminating the need for a media-themed keyboard--almost.
The inside of the FX6800-01e is slightly marred by the wiring job, but it isn't all that bad. The area near the 5.25-inch bays is just a little cluttered. The system has space for an additional 5.25-inch device, two hot-swappable hard drives, and a single mounted hard drive. The motherboard boasts room for an extra PCI Express x16 device (CrossFire, anyone?), as well as PCI Express x4 and x1 cards. That's a great amount of expansion for a value PC, though not quite as much as the options you'd find in the average power system.
Gateway bundles a giant, full-color setup guide with the rig that details how to connect the monitor and cabling. The comprehensive reference guide is specific to the FX6800-01e, and it should answer even the most technical of questions a newbie might have. We appreciate Gateway's hand-holding for FX6800-01e owners, though the inclusion of an OEM operating system CD or driver CDs would have been nice as well.
The Gateway FX6800-01e is a solid desktop PC, and we'd expect nothing less for its price. But our Top 10 Power Desktops chart has some stronger machines that cost only slightly more; which one you choose just depends on what your budget's absolute cut-off point is.

source:www.pcworld.com

CyberPower Power Infinity Pro

CyberPower's Power Infinity Pro is one of the first systems to ship with Intel's newest quad-core CPU, a 3-GHz QX9650 Core 2 Extreme chip--the company's first to be built on a 45nm manufacturing process--that's aimed squarely at enthusiasts and other early adopters. (Mainstream users will have to wait until next year for more-affordable 45nm dual-core offerings.) We were able to test the system before the QX9650 hits the streets, and found its test results to be a mixed bag. Though the Power Infinity Pro strutted its stuff in our gaming and graphics tests, in most general applications it showed only modest performance gains over systems using older quad-core chips

Our review unit shipped with 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate. In our WorldBench 6 Beta 2 test suite, it earned a strong mark of 120. That score fell a bit short, however, of the 124 mark of a CyberPower Infinity Pro that we tested a couple of months ago which uses the previous-generation, 3-GHz QX6850 Core 2 Extreme CPU.
In the Photoshop, 3DS Max rendering, and multitasking components of our WorldBench series, the Power Infinity Pro earned the best scores among all power PCs we've recently tested, though its marks were only a few seconds faster than the results of the next-closest models. In some WorldBench application tests (3DS Max DirectX, Windows Media Encoder, and VideoWave), the Power Infinity Pro's scores merely tied those of other systems (the Xi Mtower PCIe and the HP Blackbird 002) that used older CPUs. Most perplexing was the Power Infinity Pro's sluggish performance in the Nero portion of our WorldBench suite, for which its score of 592 seconds was the slowest of the lot. While none of our WorldBench scores reflect in imaging, 3D rendering, and video encoding, it should be noted that none of the applications in our test suite are optimized to take advantage of the QX9650's new SSE4 instructions, which can greatly speed up tasks such as video encoding (in applications that use SSE4).
On the plus side, the newer Power Infinity Pro posted the fastest scores ever in all of our gaming graphics tests, beating older quad-core models that use the same EVGA 8800 GTX graphics board. The Power Infinity Pro achieved an impressive average of 193 frames per second (fps) while running Doom 3 and 223 fps running Far Cry, both at 1280 by 1024 resolution with antialiasing turned on, well ahead (by about 13 percent) of the second-fastest system, the nVidia GeForce 8800 Ultra-equipped which posted results of 170 fps and 198 fps, respectively. That's not , but it's still pretty darn impressive. Though the Power Infinity Pro came with a single graphics board that performed well in our graphics tests, the system's is capable of hosting two graphics cards in a CrossFire setup. (Taking advantage of the feature would preclude using an SLI-compatible card such as the EVGA 8800 GTX card in our test system.)
Without a doubt, one of the Power Infinity Pro's best features is its stylish Cooler Master Cosmos case, which sports sturdy bars on top that are helpful when you're lifting the case--especially because it weighs a ton. The top panel includes an easily accessible connection dock with USB, FireWire, and audio ports, plus an eSATA connector, with additional USB, FireWire, and other ports on the back. Five external drive bays are easily accessed behind the hinged front panel. Our test system included a Lite-On Blu-ray DVD drive, a multiformat DVD burner, and a multiformat card reader drive-bay module, leaving two open bays for expansion.
Opening the side panel (insulated to keep the system's noise levels down) is easy, and the neat and tidy interior has plenty of room for expansion. Adding upgrades couldn't be much easier, thanks to a tool-less design that features push-button locks and pull-out aluminum racks for easy hard-drive installation. But some upgrades could be costly: For example, adding a matching pair of Corsair XMS 1GB DDR3 RAM sticks to raise the system's memory to 4GB would cost about $400. A four 120mm case fans, and a cooling attachment for the graphics board provide sufficient thermal management.
The $4299 (as of 11/2/07) Power Infinity Pro model we tested represents only one of several different configurations that CyberPower offers. Our test system also came with a generous 1.8 terabytes of hard-disk space, consisting of two 150GB, 10,000-rpm Western Digital Raptor drives (configured in a RAID 0 array) for performance and two 750GB, 7200-rpm Hitachi drives for backup and data storage that can hold hundreds of hours of video.
The included dual Sylvania 22-inch wide-screen monitors (SK2201W-B) have thin bezels that make positioning them closely side by side easier, but you get no height-adjustment control for maximum flexibility in setting them up. The picture quality was very good, with crisp readable text (even at 8 points) and nicely saturated color when we viewed still or moving images. The cordless Logitech MX3200 keyboard presents a host of useful extra keys and a wrist pad that's comfortable to type on. The MX600 laser mouse also benefits from an ergonomic design that fits nicely in the hand.
The CyberPower Power Infinity Pro is clearly aimed at enthusiasts and other early adopters who don't mind paying a premium for the latest technology. But considering that the market has few SSE-4 optimized apps, mainstream users may want to wait a bit longer before taking the plunge.
source: http://www.pcworld.com/