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Wahoo P4 Stratagem System Review
Ian Bell writes "Buddhacon reviews the P4 stratagem system from Wahoo Computers. Could this be the most powerful home system on the market? With just about every option available including an overclocked Intel 2.9GHz CPU, Radeon 9700PRO, 1GB of memory and all the cooling features you can think of you would think a system like this would blow the competition away. Just goes to show that sometimes a fine tuned V6 can beat an over the top V8."
Who, in their right mind, would buy one of these for $6536? You could easily build a faster system for 1/3 the price. It seems like a company that just doesn't know how to build computers. It comes with water cooling, but could only be overclock to 2.9GHz before it started becoming unstable. What? Why does it have a Zip drive if it comes with a CD and DVD burner? Why RAID-0 WD1200JB hard drives, and not a Cheetah 15k.3 for a boot drive? And most importantly, they don't seem to know how to ship a computer:
"Due to inadequate mounting procedures, the Radeon 9700's core was ripped from the card during shipping."
The problem is that the people with enough money to buy this sort of stuff most often have the least knowledge or time to put one together. And the time factor is substatial. When it starts flaking out on you intermitently you can't just dump it on the vendor. You have to pull out or replace each bit until you find out whats going on. Ror your average nerd this is no problem since they have lots of time on their hands -pesky things like girlfriends or lives don't sap their tinker time, but for most people they have better things to do.
So yes, you're right, but there is obviously a market for this sort of stuff.
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Why are people remotely excited about this?
I figured that some poster had managed to sucker the editors into putting an ad up, but apparently people are really into this.
Can anyone tell me why people *care* about this? There's nothing particularly significant about this computer. It's not on the level of people introducing case windows for the first time, nor is it a never-before-done hardware hack. Some guy tossed a bunch of stuff that's already been done into a case, and is selling it for a *lot* of money. Big whoop.
This doesn't have unparalleled performance, since Sun sells systems that can smoke this thing.
It doesn't let home users do anything they couldn't do before, since no software requires this, and in two years it's going to be a middling system.
It's just another currently high-end x86 system. You can get things like this from a *ton* of vendors, with overclocking even.
May we never see th
Most people don't need a Porsche either, but I sure as hell enjoy mine.
Consider this a "luxery PC" and the market for these items is generally small, but profitable.
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