OCTOBER 2004 MA XIMUMPC 41
OUR MISSION:
Find the best gaming pc ever built by mankind
LINE ‘EM UP AND
SHOOT ‘EM DOWN!
Far Cry (1280x1024)
Far Cry (1600x1200)Jedi Academy (1600x1200, 4xAA)
Halo 1.013 (1600x1200, 4xAA)
UT2003 Fly By (1600x1200, 4xAA)Does your PC make Far Cry look
more like a PowerPoint presenta-
tion than a 3D shooter? Are you
playing Doom 3 at camera-phone
resolutions? Then it’s time to beef
up with a new PC. And we’re not
talking about the $1,000 rig you
can buy at the warehouse club
along with a year’s supply of paper
towels, cashews, and athletic
socks. Nay. This is Maximum PC,
bud. The big leagues. And for
today’s games, you need some
serous firepower.
To find the fastest gaming PC
in town, we challenged six top PC
makers to send us the most powerful
gaming PCs they could assemble.
While we pretty much let the ven –
dors go plumb crazy with whatever
specs and overclocking they wanted,
we did have several rules:
Rule #1: Whatever you see here
must be available for sale to the
public. Prototype hardware was
acceptable, but the vendor had
to promise to offer production
units by the day this issue hits
newsstands.
Rule #2: Vendors had to deliverthe system at or near the price pre-
sented here.
Rule #3: If the machine is
overclocked, it has to be mighty
stable—or there would be hell
to pay.
We also enforced a stringent
deadline for our desktop death-
match. Companies that missed our
cutoff date missed the opportunity
to participate. The reason for this
is that, in the past, vendors have
pushed us for “one more day” to
get the extra part or driver build that
would give their PCs the edge.
Finally, while other magazine
roundups of this type are annual
events that are announced well
beforehand and planned for
months, we gave each vendor
only about two weeks to configure,
build, and test the machines
you see here. In our minds, this is
the fairest test of each manufac-
turer’s PC-building capabilities;
allowing months of notice lets
the biggest vendors stockpile the
fastest parts.
So who makes the fastest gam-
ing PC in town? It’s time to find out.Only the strongest, fastest PCs
survive in Maximum PC’s high-end
DESKTOP DEATHMATCH BY GORDON MAH UNG