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Systemax to Offer 'Hot-Rod' PC
Professor_Quail writes "C|Net News reports that PC maker Systemax is going to be offering a new line of PC's aimed at gamers and performance enthusiasts. The computers, priced at approximately 3-4 thousand dollars, are touted by the company specifically for their overclocking performance; the DoubleX line comes equipped with a water-cooling system and dual hard drives configured with RAID-0. The systems will be sold through the company's TigerDirect subsidiary."
Water-cooling has not been shown in tests to give statistically significant improvements in cooling vs. a high-end fan and heatsink (the primary advantage of water-cooling is it is quieter, but that isn't a performance issue), and overclocking is primarily a way for tinkerhead geeks to get more mileage out of old processors.
The hard drives are a nice touch, but any slashdot reader could build a system whose perfomance equals this overpriced iron and have enough left over for a hooker, a bottle of Courvissier, and a pack of Sheiks. The primary market for these bells-and-whistles systems will be late adopters with more money than brains and a tendency to be easily distracted by "the shiny".
Anybody else see the irony in comparing THIS machine to the $199 Walmart/Lindows/AOL machine?
$199 to 'three or four thousand dollars' is quite the spread for two items that, at a certain level, are more alike than different.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Why would anyone bother overclocking with today's processors? The clock increase gained by it will be surpassed in a few weeks by a new processor release anyway, which is a testament to how ineffective it is these days. It's about % gain, man. Maybe in the days of the old Celeron 300 chips, where you could more than double your clockspeed, at the expense of processor life, this was effective, but I can't see there being any financial reason to do it now.
--sdem
The systems they will be offering for 3-4 grand, could probably be built for less than $2,000. A high end system is where people can save the most money rolling their own. With all the online guides and books available for PC building, just about anyone can build a pc a in day, its really not that hard. I started building them five years ago, and now I'm building budget systems on the side for friends and relatives, padding the price by at least $200 and still beating Dell's prices on their low end systems, but not the ultra low end.
I'm perceiving my modest 1GHz Athlon desktop as sounding like a vacuum cleaner. I dare not envision how the monsters in the article would sound. Who would like to shell out $4K for a machine sounding like a jet engine warming up? Do these gamers live far into the woods, where they can crank up their 900 watt speakers in order to hear anything in a game like Thief (where the audio clues is most important)? Or did they accomplish the same thrashing of their eardrums by using head phones on maximum volume? How else can they stand the noise?
What fun is a "super gaming rig" if you can only stand sitting near it for 15 minutes?
Personally, I'd rather pay a premium for a quiet machine. I'd pay as much as 50% extra to get a silent desktop. Until some progress is done on the noise arena, I'm sticking to my silent IBM laptops. For me gaming on a PC is dead and will be until the manufacturers start taking this problem seriously.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
Battlefield and UT2k3 don't even come close, either... A $600 comp will easily run those at 90fps+
Doom3 will not run like that on anything today, btw.
And as it's been said before, the whole system could be built for about under $1400 at newegg, and if you went down to your local PC shop for someone to put it together, it would probably cost $100 at the most.
If you spent $3000 on a PC, just max it out with top-of-the-line products, then buy an entire TERABYTE, or more, of hd space. Believe me, it can be used easily with broadband if you're a power downloader/ripper.
Besides, overclocking sucks -- it's like driving 80MPH in a 75MPH zone speed-wise, except it gets you in a lot of more trouble. Unless you have one of those 300A/1.5As that magically double themselves, of course...
I see this as fundamentally flawed.
Most of the same enthusiasts that this is aimed towards, especially those needing/desiring watercooling, are going to do it themselves. They could build this system for $1500.
Not to mention the fact that they would do it anyways just out of the sheer enjoyment of tinkering with their machines.
Plus, they get to pick exactly what parts they want, not whatever the company decides to put in there.
There is the issue of a warantee, being able to send it back if it blows up... But is this worth the extra $1500-$2000? Absolutely not. You could build an entirely new system for that price.