Slashdot Mirror
Review: Monarch Computer's Nemesis FX-57 7800 SLI Gaming
The system itself is as below:
Case: Thermaltake Custom Painted Shark Full Tower Aluminum Case Series w/Window (Fire Pearl)
View
Power Supply: Enermax Noisetaker EG701AX-VE-SFMA ATX 2.0 w/SLI Support 600W Power Supply
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium nForce4 SLI Audio, GB-LAN, IEEE, USB, PCI-E, SATAII w/RAID, DDR-400, ATX
View
Processors: AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (939)
View
Heat Sink: Zalman CNPS7000-CU Copper CPU Fan
Memory: 2 GB (4 pcs 512MB) DDR (400) PC-3200 Corsair w/LED Display (TWINX1024-3200XLPRO)
Hard Drives: 1 x Western Digital 74 GB SATA 10K Raptor (WD740GD), 2 x Western Digital Caviar SE 250 GB SATAII 16MB Cache 7200 RPM (WD2500KS)
RAID Setup: RAID 0 (Zero) Setup
DVD-RW: Plextor PX-716SA DVD±RW 16x8x16x DVD+RW 48x24x48x CD-RW SATA
Floppy: Mitsumi Floppy 7-in-1 USB Card Reader/Smart Media Drive (Black)
Video Cards: 2 x NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB GDDR3, VIVO/, Dual-DVI
Sound Card: Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum INT Drive Sound
Wireless NIC: D-Link DWL-AG530 Tri-Mode Dualband (2.4/5GHz) Wireless 108Mbps PCI Adapter
Industry Standard Upgradable
USB Ports on front of case
6 Month Warranty - Free tech support
View
All Monarch PCs include: 48-72 hr. Burn-in Diagnostic (to ensure all components are malfunction free); Latest BIOS, drivers, and tested patches installed (All drivers are also included on CD); award-winning assembly and installation including tie-off on all cables (for improved airflow); final 62-point inspection by Intel and AMD Certified Technicians, and Free Unlimited Phone Support. All manuals, disks, cables and other accessories included with your retail components will be included with your system.
As is fairly obvious, the machine's specs are pretty hardcore. In doing some of the standard testing, the system turned out a 3DMark05 test of 13,002 whichout missing a beat. Similarly, the Sysmark04 score was a studly 225. To be blunt, I don't think I've ever seen those types of numbers before - in real life, that is.
What was even more impressive for me at least was the machine's ability to handle that most important of tasks - playing games. Playing Doom 3, with all graphic options cranked (including the console accessible ones) this machine still turned out a 80.2 FPS. Turning off the console options, and just going in ultra-mode had a frame rate of 87.3, sustained. My other gaming obessions, World of Warcraft (Props to Ajul-Nerub server!) managed to turn in a more paltry 77.3 FPS, but given the fact that you are often depending on your connection with WoW for some of that, that's pretty amazing. DivX encoding was also quite fast - 1574 seconds on the sample size that I used.
The more subtle touch on the machine was evident as well - you can open the thing up from multiple angles, with a swing front door on it, and the lighting was handled nicely. And given the machine's power and draw, I was fairly impressed with the noise from the various fans. The heat output from the machine is fairly impressive; you'll not need that space heater in the room anymore in the winter time, but the actual heat inside of the machine case, and CPU always stayed well within manufacturer recommended ranges. While running the very high-end graphic testing of Doom 3, the temp did get some spikes, but nothing that was concerning. The nVidia 7800 duals make a huge difference.
One of the other features that I liked is the fast primary drive, and back-up, slower, but RAIDed drives. It's nice for installing high access demand apps on the primary, but using the other drives as storage drives. The other comment I would make, speaking as an obessive wire organizer, is that the machine itself ships very very nicely tied off cabling-wise. I think this looks nice, but also, I would suspect, makes a appreciable difference to the heat flow. One other important note is that they offer a 3 year 24/7 support plan - all warranties are different options, 'course.
In short, the machines rocks. The issue, of course, is the pricing - but if you are looking for a top end machine, this is a phenomenal rig. Monarch does a great job of supporting the product, with a great packet of documentation and information that comes with the machine, but also active forum postings and involvement from the tech support on their boards. Great company, great machine.
[x] Memory: 2 GB [Check]
[x] Processors: AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (939) [Check]
[x] Hard Drives: 1 x 74 GB SATA, 2 x 250 GB SATAII
[x] Video Cards: 2 x NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB
This extreme gaming platform should meet the minimum requirements to play Solitare under Windows Vista. For those planning on gaming on Vista, how much more muscle can you pack into this rig?
The price for the system that I had been testing was over $5000.
Ah, part of the TCO equation! But, heck, you should be able to buy this system for $3000 a year from now. Funny how this pricing reminds me of what it cost to have 1 PC XT with MS-DOS on it back in the mid-eighties.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Base Price: $4,589.00
;-)
Holy CRAP that's expensive! And that's (apparently) without the monitor! If I may suggest, you should be able to build the same machine for about half the price, perhaps a bit more.
Asus A8N-SLI Premium nForce4
Sweet! They chose my favorite board! I have the A8N-E board (same thing, but only one Vid card) and I must say that it is a VERY nice board. Practically everything you could ever want is built in. NForce4 chipset, Gigabit ethernet, PCI Express, 8 channel audio, 10 USB ports, hardware firewall, hardware RAID support, 4 SATA-300 (aka SATA-II) connectors, IDE support, nearly all AMD64 chips supported, etc. I haven't found a better board, especially in that price range!
Sound Card: Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum INT Drive Sound
Can anyone explain what is up with this? The board comes with 8 channel sound built in. What do you need a separate sound card for? Is the sound quality really that much better?
BTW, if you get the A8N board, don't get the ASUS Star ICE. I've got one of those things and I'm now using it as a desk ornament. I just wanted an extra fan to keep things cool. I had no idea that I'd get a friggin' JET ENGINE! (I'm not kidding either. This thing can barely fit in the case when installed.) It gets great comments from my coworkers though. "What the HELL is that!?"
If you don't believe me on its size (no one ever does) just look at this pic.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I hope it pays for the hosting costs... or the editor's training :)
I've bought Monarch computers before, usually on the value-end for simple workstations. They held up fairly well. But there was always some small problem like a CD burner never worked on a new system, or the CPU fan would die and nuke the CPU. I'm sure they love you plugging their products on such a major website. Did you disclose if you work for them or not?
how much power this baby needs ?
Does it come along with it's small nuclear power plant ?
This just in: a computer built with the highest end components yields the highest end performance.
This was the most blatant advertisement as an "article" that I have ever seen. Too bad Monarch's servers can't handle the load; it makes the advertisement far less effective.
Let's take RAID and use it to halve the time it takes to lose all our data. Great idea.
I'd rather have two RAID-1 arrays, one small and fast and one larger and slower. But maybe l33t gamers don't care about their data.
1574 seconds on the sample size that I used.
Wow, that't amazingly fast!
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
they list a feature on the motherboard, "IEEE". Do they realize that IEEE is an orginization, and not a part? The number that goes after IEEE is more important, like 802.11 or 1394
1: Does it help you save money on your heating bill ;)
2: Could it achieve flight if you took off the side of the case
3: does the Decibel rating make my stage amp look like a pair of cheap headphones
4:Does it weigh more than a small car
6:Does it run linux
7: what's it like in soviet Russia
8: Is this the PC they are running their servers on
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
"RAID Setup: RAID 0 (Zero) Setup"
Stupid stupid stupid.
Have fun rebuiliding your system. Really this shouldn't even be labelled "RAID setup". There is no redundancy (the R in RAID). Two discs stripped like this means you have two chances of losing everything on *both* of them. Is hard drive performance so critical that the chance is worth it?
I bought an Overdrive PC Torque.SLI a while back. I talked with Mario there, who actually talked me down off a higher end processor, telling me he could hook me up with a slightly lower end, $800 cheaper processor but get far more overclocking out of it than the faster process.
It's fast as hell, and when it had a stability issue due to the overclocking (yes, it was pushing it), he helped tweak it to where it was rock solid.
If you're going to pay this much for a computer, get someone who actually knows how to squeeze the maximum out of it, if you don't have the time or ability to do it yourself.
"Video Cards: 2 x NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB GDDR3, VIVO/, Dual-DVI"
:)
No game manufacturer is going to make a game that REQUIRES so much brute-force GPU power to play...that would kill the market. All this would do is make games playable with insane settings like 4x FSAA and 8x Anisotropic Filtering. But most gamers (read: the average gamer) can't tell the difference between different levels of anisotropic, or the difference between 2x and 4x FSAA unless they stop and look at the screen. When is the last time you ran through the jungle in Far Cry and said to yourself while being chased by a mutant monkey with uncanny ability to maul, "Damn these leaves need to lose some jaggies"?
The point is that as soon as games come out that need next generation GPU's, your SLI system is obsolete because it likely won't have HARDWARE features to perform next-generation effects. The analogy I like to make is that 4 GeForce 4 MX's can't match a single GeForce 4 Ti 4200 because the 4 MX doesn't have hardware shaders while the Ti does. So is it really worth dropping that extra money (don't forget, your mobo needs to have extra PCI x 8 or x 16 slot as well, so there is a little extra cost there too)?
That being said, this system you posted is quite beastly
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium nForce4 SLI Audio, GB-LAN, IEEE, USB, PCI-E, SATAII w/RAID, DDR-400, ATX
Wow, there's an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers integrated on the motherboard? No wonder it's such an expensive setup...
Why does Hemos think that backing things up to a RAID0 which is "slower" is a convenient thing?
RAID0 is FASTER than a single drive configuration, because you're doubling the number of spindles and heads working together. It also offers NO REDUNDANCY so backing up anything to a RAID0 is completely and utterly retarded. He's got everything ass-backwards.
This is why reviews on Slashdot are moronic, whether it's Zork's misinformed and useless game reviews or hardware reviews by the tech-uneducated editors. Stick to linking to real review sites guys, please.
Now watch in a day there will be a Slashdot story linking to Hemos's review...
"I want to get more into theory, because everything works in theory." -John Cash
For $5000, you'd think the warrenty would be a bit longer than 6 months. I realize that tech gets old pretty fast, but aren't they being a bit optimistic that in 6 months you'll realize how old school your PC had become and fork over another $5000.
One of the other features that I liked is the fast primary drive, and back-up, slower, but RAIDed drives.
Hemos, I won't be tresting that RAID-0 to backup anything. It is strictly a user feature so you can claim you have a really big dic^Hsk.
Anm
Who said anything about enthusiasts? I'm actually puzzled the moderations are leaning towards funny, because I really was trying to make a non-humourous point. It's perhaps funny-ironic, the ultimate system will hardly be the minimum for the next OS release from the vender most people get their work/entertainment environment from.
That mid-eighties box, which cost about $3,000 was about a mid to high end model, it had a faster clock, 20 MB HD and a Hercules video card. It was the bare minimum to do work, most of which was running a terminal emulator, but the rest was some work in Turbo C
You can buy a very capable system for $300 at Fry's right now. There's a large gulf between capable for today's OS releases and the one coming out in a year. The big question is, how many suckers are going to bite?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If the original poster is reading this, could you do me a favor and run an Excel benchmark on it, since that's what I'd be using it for?
Get back to me with the results ASAP... the bank just approved my $5k loan.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
... I can't even do it. I tried, I really did.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
I thought The Monarch's nemesis was Dr. Venture.
[DRTFA]
my pet machine
RAID0 should properly be called an AID. But people will just call it an "AID Array", which is redundant as the A in AID already stands for Array. So then the R becomes appropriate again.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
1) Their prices are about as good as those you find on pricewatch for components.
2) I had a tech issue and they did respond to me. It was my error. They also seemed to be helpful on their forums.
3) They claim to do a burnin but they did not - I know because of the progress reports on the website and because the MB I have records how much time it has been on. They may have reset the HD counter - it showed only 6 hours - but there progress reports did not allow enough time for it to burn in as long as they say it would.
4) I would probably buy from them again.
I can't completely agree with that. Being somewhat shorter than the national average (I'm 5' 7") I find that the reason those of us whom you would consider short and starting fights is the result of those who are taller thinking they can do what they want.
For example, when I used to go out to bars (and did my best not to fall asleep because I was bored with the whole scene) invariably there were one or two guys who were taller than myself who felt it was perfectly acceptable to plow their way through a crowd. By plow I mean push people aside because they felt they were the most important people in the world and the normal rules of courtesy didn't apply to them.
Now, in that situation if myself or someone else who was shorter than these nimrods were to go after these guys, would they have started the fight or would they simply have been retaliating for what had been taking place?
However, there is the Napoleon complex which does suggest that those on the short end of the scale are more aggressive though this has never been fully demonstrated or observed to any degree.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
We work a lot with voodoopc in creating our 3d workstations for Radiologists, and have noted that SLI in "broken" mode does indeed produce 4 monitors' worth of 3d acceleration (with this particular motherboard at least). I'm typing this on exactly the same setup, but with 6800Gt's instead of the new 7800gt's, but I have to say that once you warm up to 60 inches of desktop there's no going back, ESPECIALLY for developers. Every once in awhile I'll kick the whole thing back to SLI mode and play WOW too, and man the result is amazing. It's not so much how high a resolution you can get to as it is how fluid you can make a game, if you follow me =)
-chitlenz
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A friend of mine asked me to help chose components for his next PC, and, not paying attention to the prices, we (actually, 'I' would be more appropriate) decided on a single 7800GTX and X2-4800+ instead of two cards in SLI and FX-57. Although the possibility of adding a second gfx card still remains, we decided to only buy one card. It would always be possible to buy a second one, or throw the current one out and buy next gen card which would grind two of these into dust anyway.
Now, FX-57 usually beats the X2-4800+ in games, but by a rather small margin: 5-6fps was the most significant difference. What makes the difference is adding a background task, like file compression or Skype or whatever. FX-57 drops almost in half (if the task is significant), while the X2 only slows down by 3-5fps. Hopefully game developers will take advantage of all the additional cores and the X2 would be even better in the future.
The whole system cost about $2500, including a quality case and PSU, two 250gb drives and all the other stuff necessary.
Just out of sheer morbid curiousity I priced this out on Newegg, grand total minus shipping and any applicable tax was $3,702.95 not a bad mark-up they have going there. But if you put it together yourself you won't get the swanky paintjob. But then again you won't get the retarded disk configuration either.
Thermaltake Shark Tower Black - $169.00
Enermax Noisetaker EG701AX-VE-SFMA ATX 2.0 - $149.99
Asus A8N-SLI Premium nForce4 SLI - $175.00
AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (939) - $1,011
Zalman CNPS7000-CU Copper CPU Fan - $42.99
4 x Corsair w/LED Display (TWINX1024-3200XLPRO) - $430
1 x Western Digital 74 GB SATA 10K Raptor (WD740GD) - $183.00
2 x Western Digital Caviar SE 250 GB SATAII 16MB Cache 7200 RPM (WD2500KS) - $237.98
Plextor PX-716SA DVD±RW 16x8x16x DVD+RW 48x24x48x CD-RW SATA - $116.99
Mitsumi Floppy 7-in-1 USB Card Reader/Smart Media Drive (Black) - $21.00
2 x NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB GDDR3, VIVO/, Dual-DVI - $928.00
Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum INT Drive Sound - $176.00
D-Link DWL-AG530 Tri-Mode Dualband (2.4/5GHz) Wireless 108Mbps PCI Adapter - $62.00
My friend's Audigy 2 ZS Platinum has more than just a slew of 1/8" miniplugs on the front bay.
Headphone Out (1/4" Stereo Jack)
Line In 1 (1/4" Stereo Jack , shared with Microphone In with Gain Control)
Line In 2 (1/4" Stereo Jack)
Line In 3 (2x RCA Jack)
Optical SPDIF In/Out
Coaxial SPDIF In/Out
Digital Out for 5.1 support (6-channel SPDIF Output to Creative digital speakers)
MIDI In / Out
With the ASIO 2.0 drivers for low latency (as low as 2ms) multi-track playback and recording at 16-bit/48kHz or 24-bit/96kHz, we have even been able to do a little multi-track recording for their band.
If you think that all Audigy cards only come with the old 1/8" miniplugs, then you clearly don't know what you're talking about...
The review said:
ErMaC spewed forth:
It's quite clear that you did not bother to think about what the review said. The RAIDed drives are 7200 rpm whereas the primary is 10K. So, he was right. The RAIDed drives are slower than the primary. Furthermore, the fact that he said "but RAIDed" suggests a contrast against the relative slowness. It's obvious he understands that even though the drives are slower, the RAID configuration should overcome that.
Now, the review did say "back-up" drives. Perhaps a poor choice of words, but he goes on to explain: "It's nice for installing high access demand apps on the primary, but using the other drives as storage drives." This suggests that he uses them as regular storage drives. You know, like for normal data storage, not for backing up data.
All of the SBLive and Audigy cards do an internal resample from 44.1Khz to 48khz. If you're listening on good gear, this really screws the sound up. Unless you can stay at 48khz from source to delivery, you DO NOT want to route sound through an Audigy if you really care about the quality.
.WAV file over fiber or coax to your stereo, even with iTunes or WMP, and have it sound perfect.
The Audiotrak Prodigy and M-Audio Revolution 7.1 are both solid cards, with better DACs than the Audigy has, and they don't do the 48khz butchering. If you drive them with ASIO or kernel streaming, you can get true lossless output.
For whatever weird reason, the M-Audio Sonica Theater, if you configure it for 44.1Khz out, will do perfect lossless output even on normal programs like iTunes or Windows Media Player. Somehow, it avoid Windows' kmixer and sends an undamaged bitstream. Using that card, you can play a DTS-encoded
It's very hard to get really good sound out of Windows... if your sound education has been on a computer, chances are extremely high that you don't yet know very much. It was certainly a learning curve for me.... at this point, at least I know I'm ignorant.
That is so right.
These 3yo specs are still more than sufficient for the vast majority of people, including (non-teenage boy) gamers:
Purposefully no mention of disk space, because that need is always growing.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1