24 MA XIMUMPC SEPTEMBER 2006
Dream
Machine
UNDER THE
HOOD
THE EMPIRE
STRIKES BACK
Yeah, we’ve been raving like AMD
fanboys since the Athlon 64 snatched
the performance crown from Intel
two years ago, but we’ll be the fi rst
to admit that the Athlon has a stump
where its lightsaber hand was. Intel’s
new 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X
is simply heads, shoulders, thighs,
and buttocks above the Athlon 64 and
the Pentium 4 when it comes to per-
formance. Hell, we can’t fi nd a bench-
mark that the Athlon 64 FX-62 wins.THE NFORCE IS
STRONG IN THIS ONE
What were you expecting, CrossFire
and an Intel chipset? With all due
respect to ATI and Intel, we wanted a
chipset that supported two x16 PCI
Express connections to the GPUs,
with the potential to upgrade to quad
SLI. The nVidia nForce 590 Intel
Edition chipset, paired with XFX’s
hyper-clocked XXX GeForce 7900
GTX graphics cards in SLI, delivers
the best performance.The Dream Machine’s beauty
is more than skin deep!
Beneath it’s fancy exterior
are the exact components
DM2006 needs to power past
the competition