When High End Gaming Machines Fight

mikemuch writes "Games for Windows Magazine and ExtremeTech teamed up to determine which prebuilt high-end PC delivers the ultimate game performance in terms of frame-rate and ability to yield the highest game quality settings on large displays. The winner, VoodooPC's Omen, features an Intel Core 2 Duo QX6800 processor and two Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX's in SLI configuration. It delivers over 15,000 3DMarks (as do a few of the other contestants), but 'only' costs $5,700 — in contrast with some of the other machines that go for close to eight grand."

Comments

Honestly

[webheaded]

Who cares about prebuilt systems that much anyway? Most PC enthusiasts that are looking for this kind of power are the type that build their own PCs anyway, so who are these companies marketing to?

What would you guys do? Build your own or buy from some random manufacturer?

Re:Honestly

[StarWreck]

Dude, you are so, like, behind the times. Everybody thats anybody knows the filthy rich white suburbanites play Battlefield 2142 now instead of that old Battlefield 2.

Re:Honestly

[bunions]

> I have yet to come across a PC component that would make me ship it back or return it because of any faults,

Lucky you! Eventually statistics will catch up with you.

I'm actually pretty happy to not have to build another system. I don't really have it in me anymore to keep up with what ram timings work with what cpu and motherboard and what the optimal configuration is and lord knows what all. You can find plenty of places that will build you a good system from actual name-brand parts for very little over what you'd spend assembling it yourself. If I never have to wash thermal grease out of my pants again, I'll be happy.

Re:Honestly

[Nightspirit]

Oddly enough the only thing wrong with my new home-built system was my Corsair memory.

I understand the feeling though. First I spent 8 hours wondering why the damn thing wouldn't boot (I didn't push hard enough on the intel core 2 duo heatsink pins, a much worse configuration than AMD, which is relatively easy). Then I do a memtest, everything is find, install the OS, then everything starts going haywire. I do another memtest and find out one of the sticks of RAM is bad.

The part that sucks is that the memory is matched, and I'm not going to waste time sending both sticks back (I want to actually use what I paid for), so I hope that it doesn't make a difference if the ram is matched or not.

Re:Just an observation

[DragonWriter]

Just as an observation, you see several PS3 fans say that you can't buy a PC that outperforms the PS3 ...

Really, where? The only time I've seen anything like that is in response to the inevitable "anything you can do on a PS3 you can do cheaper on a PC" where the response is that you can't buy a sub-$600 PC that outperforms a PS3.

Re:Fight?! What fight?!

[Simon80]

1. What part of the article are you referring to?
2. When Apple releases any hardware that can compare with the gaming performance of these machines, then you can think about making snarky comments

$6000 == $600 ?

[AP2k]

"It delivers over 15,000 3DMarks (as do a few of the other contestants), but 'only' costs $5,700 " Which is in stark contrast to $600... You were saying?

Re:Fight?! What fight?!

[stonecypher]

Personally, I prefer high end gaming machines to have games.

Re:Fight?! What fight?!

[udderly]

Personally, I like to build my own system, as high-end as I want. That way, I don't spend $4000 on something that could cost 300-500 bucks.

There is no way that either of the systems would cost anything like $300-$500, even at wholesale. My wholesale account at Ingram Micro indicates that the two GeForce 8800 video cards alone would cost nearly $1200 (and they don't even have any available) and the processor almost $1000. The fact is that on an older system, you might, by biding your time and doing rebates, be able to save a substantial amount of money, but not on high-demand hardware like this.

On the other hand, I never bother to buy any of the latest high-end stuff; I know that it will be half as much in six months.

Re:Fight?! What fight?!

[Sir_Sri]

That might happen if Apple stopped selling neutered video cards like the X1900XT with the current mac pros.

Seriously, that's a huge market that for some reason apple has completely missed. Their Mac Pro line is not far off from an ultimate gaming rig, drop in a decent video card (make OSX recognize any PCI express video card properly!), a decent soundcard (which I think they have?), apply 10 minutes of that apple case engineering to make it look pretty and keep cool and voila now you have the ultimate geek toy, it runs OSX out of the box, you can install windows and linux, massive hard drive expansion for games music, movies, and all those operating systems what more could you want?

I think for the same amount of money (give or take the cost of OSX) apple could build machines this good, and people would buy them in droves. Why would any self respecting geek by a 5700 dollar ultimate gaming rig, when they can get a 5800 dollar ultimate gaming rig, that also runs OSX (or a 2000 dollar rig or a 3000 dollar rig)? It needs to support any PCIx card though, so I can drop in a Nvidia 9800 GTX when they come out.