MaximumPC 2005 03

Reviews

Voodoo Rage F: 5

Who says gaming rigs have to make a racket?

W

e’ve long said that great

PCs are crafted, not built.

Voodoo PC invokes that

mantra with its latest work of

wonder, the Rage F:5. This machine

blends elegance and speed in a

sophisticated water-cooled

chassis that doesn’t sound

like a helicopter crashed

into your offi ce.

The Rage F:5 is a logical

progression for the class of

boutique PCs. While it used to

be enough to paint an off-the-

shelf case green or fold the

wires in a fancy manner, such

steps are no longer suffi cient.

Hence the Rage F:5’s custom

aluminum chassis, called

the Voodoo Maga.

You might notice similarities

between the Voodoo Maga and the

Lian Li PC-V1000, but that’s to be

expected—

Lian Li

manufactures

the case for

Voodoo.

The most

noticeable

difference

between the

two cases is

the Maga’s

ability to

accommodate

even Extended

ATX mobos.

The Maga also

uses a reverse

mounting

system, so

the case opens

from the right

instead of the

left. Finally, the

Maga features

a baffl e that

separates the

power supply

and hard drives

from the main

compartment

where the

motherboard

is mounted.

It’s like a

McDonald’s

McDLT, in that respect: The hot stays

hot and the cold stays cold. The

idea is to keep the hard drives and

power supply from heating up the

rest of the system.

Inside, the machine packs an

overclocked (by 100MHz, to 2.7GHz)

Athlon FX-55 on an Asus A8N-SLI

Deluxe board. Two nVidia GeForce

6800 Ultra cards in SLI mode power

the graphics, and there’s 2GB of

Crucial Ballistix DDR400.

Besides cooling the CPU and

dual videocard GPUs, the water

cooler also controls the chipset

temperature—thus cutting out

one more fan. We wondered if the

videocard RAM would overheat

without a fan to move air over the

heatsinks, but we didn’t experience

any problems. Because the inverted

design leaves the GPUs facing up, it’s

possible the heat they generate rises

instead of sitting on the cards.

Storage is handled by a pair of

120GB Seagate 7200.8 drives running

in RAID 0. This is actually our biggest

complaint. A mere 240GB just isn’t

enough today, especially after we laid

eyes on the stack of drives stuffed into

the Katana SLI.

The Rage F:5 comes through in

the most-important category, though:

performance. The Rage F:5 unseats

last month’s Velocity Micro machine

in our Adobe Photoshop 7.0 script. The

F:5 also does well in SYSmark2004—

in fact, it’s the fastest machine

we’ve seen in eight months. On the

other hand, an overclocked P4EE

machine still holds the 8-month-old

record of 218.

The Rage F:5 really excelled in our

3DMark2005 benchmark, beating the

three other SLI rigs we’ve seen

so far: The Rage F:5 was 27 percent

faster than the Xeon-based Alienware

ALX system we reviewed in January,

15 percent faster than the Katana

SLI, and about 4 percent faster than

last month’s Velocity Micro Raptor

64 Dual X.

Also, of the four SLI-based systems

that have come through the Lab,

the Rage F:5 is by far the quietest of

the bunch. That a machine could be

this fast and make nary a sound is a

wonder in itself.

—GORDON MAH UNG

66 MAXIMUMPC MARCH 2005

UNDER THE HOOD

DISPLAY

Videocard Two nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra in SLI

mode 256MB RAM (425MHz core,

550MHz DDR)

STORAGE

Hard drives Two 120GB Seagate 7200.8

(7,200rpm SATA, NCQ, 8MB cache)

RAID 0 via nForce4-SLI chipset

Optical Pioneer DVR-108 DVD-RW DL

drives (16x DVD-R/+R, 4x DVD-RW/+RW/

+R DL, 32x CD-R)

BUNDLE

Windows XP Professional, Half-Life 2 Bronze Edition,

FUEL Software Essentials, Voodoo Game Doctor

THE BRAINS

CPU AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (2.6GHz,

overclocked to 2.7GHz 1MB L2)

Mobo Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce4 Pro

chipset)

RAM 2GB DDR400 Crucial Technology

Ballistix (two 1GB sticks)

I/O ports Six Hi-Speed USB (two front, four

rear), three FireWire A (one front,

two rear), parallel port, PS/2 mouse

and keyboard

LAN Dual Gigabit LAN (one nVidia and

one Marvell) , integrated

AUDIO

Soundcard Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

Case Voodoo Maga aluminum chassis,

Eye of the Storm glass window,

Voodoo 600W Noisetaker 2.0

Fans/extras Three 120mm case fans,

Intercooler water cooling

Keyboard Logitech DiNovo Media Desktop

Bluetooth

FINE DETAILS

BOOT: 40 sec. DOWN: 11 sec.

Quiet gaming in an elegant case.

GARLIC

ONIONS

With only 240GB of storage, DV editing or torrent

warehousing will be limited.

$5,995, http://www.voodoopc.com

MAXIMUMPCVERDICT 9

      



PERCENT FASTER

ZERO

POINT

SCORES

SYSmark2004

Premiere Pro

Photoshop 7.0

MusicMatch 8.1

Jedi Academy

Halo

172

720 sec

289 sec

281 sec

54.4 fps

38.8 fps

100%

208

618 sec

240 sec

231 sec

+

112.8 fps +

133.5 fps

VOODOO RAGE F:5 SCORES

Our zero-point system includes: a 2.2GHz Athlon 64 FX-51, an Asus SK8N mother-

board, 1GB of Corsair Registered TwinX DDR400 RAM, an ATI Radeon 9800 XT, a

250GB Western Digital WD2500JB hard drive, Plextor PX-708A DVD burner, and a PC

Power and Cooling TurboCool 510 Deluxe power supply.

Black Beauty: The Voodoo Rage F:5 is a delight to behold.