MaximumPC 2006 10

reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized

80 MAXIMUMPC october 2006

W

hen we looked at Digital Storm’s

Twister Ultra 4, we thought of it as

Every Dude’s Machine. You know,

it’s just how the average person would build it.

There’s no fancy-pants paint or custom wiring.

But there is a gratuitous use of drive bay doo-

dads like an LED screen, removable hard drive

adapter, and Creative Labs Live drive. The

upshot? The already-macho-looking Cooler

Master CM Stacker case looks even more,

well, macho. Yup, this rig will make you hitch

up your pants, snort, and say, “Oh yeah, this is

just how I’d build it—none of that sissy stuff!”

That’s not to say the machine’s fit and

finish isn’t impressive.

The water-cooling on

the CPU and dual

GeForce 7900 GTX

cards is top-of-the-line.

Because 350-plus watts

of heat must be wicked

out of the case, Digital

Storm thought a single

small radiator wasn’t

sufficient for the dual-

videocard/CPU combi-

nation. So Digital Storm

cleverly put one radiator

on the case’s rear and somehow magically

plumbed a second radiator to vent out the top

of the case. It’s a neat job except for one thing:

Not all of the hoses are secured with hose

clamps, so they could pop off at any moment.

They’re on fairly tight, but unsecured hoses

around $6,500 worth of hardware makes us

nn-nnn-nervous. We’re also annoyed that

the fans attached to the two radiators run

super-loud. We’d expect a dual-radiator setup

to run at a quieter speed.

In the hard drive cat-

egory, the Twister Ultra

includes four 150GB

Raptors in RAID 0. A sin-

gle Seagate 750GB

Barracuda gives you

enough space to back

up all the data on the

RAID array, and sits in an easy-to-remove

drive rack. The overclocked 7900 GTX cards

let you run any game on the market with

aplomb. But the Twister Ultra 4’s processor is

a weakness. Yesterday, the Athlon 64 FX-62

was hot, and today it’s simply not. Digital

Storm couldn’t secure an Intel Core 2 Extreme

CPU by our deadline. (Note that Falcon

Northwest, reviewed on page 78, was faced

with the same deadline but managed to

secure the powerful Intel chip.)

In the end, an FX-62—even one running at

3GHz—is like bringing a Tribble to a Klingon

house party. You know it’s going to end up

as garnish on an order of stewed gagh. The

Twister Ultra ran so slow compared with

Falcon’s Mach 4 that we weren’t even sure it

was plugged into the wall.

The good news is that the Twister Ultra 4

compares well to our Athlon 64 FX-60 zero-

point system, chalking up scores between 28

and 14 percent faster than the 2.6GHz FX-60.

The bad news is that Digital Storm reached

a little far with this rig’s GPUs. The machine

came with its cards running at a 683MHz

core and 876MHz DDR RAM but could not

complete Quake 4 until we cranked the cards

down halfway to the stock clocks. Even at

667/850, however, there were signs of cor-

ruption, and successive runs of Quake 4 got

progressively slower. After three runs, we were

down to 85fps. Not good, especially consid-

ering the water-cooling on these cards. Oh,

by the way, none of the machine’s four front-

mounted USB ports were plugged in.

We’ve seen Digital Storm machines in

the past and they’ve been competent. Not

this time. Up against the heavily overclocked

Core 2 Extreme in the Falcon Northwest

machine, and given its puny Athlon 64 and

two glitchy, overclocked GPUs, this review

can only end in tears.

—Gordon Mah UnG

Digital Storm

Twister Ultra 4

Knife at a gunfight? Athlon 64 can’t handle the heat

Ultimately, the inclusion of the underpowered athlon 64 FX-

62 leaves the Twister Ultra limp.

The Twister Ultra 4 is
more beast than beauty.

$6,510, http://www.digitalstormonline.com

digital storm twister ultra 4

bill paXTon

Trick water-cooling and a

RAID array could have made

the Twister a mean machine.

bill shaTner^5

Noisy acoustics, overly

overclocked videocards, and

last month’s CPU.

benchMarks

sysmark 2004 se 275

zero point scores

premiere pro 2.0^3000 sec

photoshop Cs 2 295 sec

recode 2.0 2100 sec

Fear 75 fps

Quake 4 110.5 fps

0       10%  20%        30%     40%     50%     60%     70%     80%     90%     100%

305

2,654 sec

247 sec

1,014 sec (107.1%)

134 fps

90 fps

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus

A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and

a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU.

under the hood

cpU AMD Athlon 64 FX-62

(2.8GHz dual core@3GHz)

MoBo Asus M2N32-SLI (nForce4

590 SLI)

rAM 2GB Corsair (two 1GB sticks)

LAn Dual Gigabit LAN

HArD DriVes Four 150GB WD Raptors in

RAID 0 and one 750GB

Seagate Barracuda

opticAL Plextor PX-760A, Sony

DDU-1615

ViDeocArD Two GeForce 7900 GTX in

SLI (683MHz/876MHz)

soUnDcArD Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty

cAse Cooler Master CM Stacker 830

Boot: 47 sec. DoWn: 9 sec.

brains

beaUTy