MaximumPC 2005 12

58 MA XIMUMPC DECEMBER 2005

The Road Runner

Part 1970s-style MOPAR muscle car, part state-of-the-

art computing power—you’re looking at one lust-wor-

thy gaming rig

Take a good look at the Road Runner. Everything about

this mid-tower screams asphalt-shredding speed—

from the hot-rod metallic-orange paint job, to the dual

BFG GeForce 7800 GTX boards running in SLI, to the

water-cooled AMD Athlon 64 FX-57.

We chose the components for this rig with utmost

care, having two goals in mind: the best possible

performance, and a reasonably quiet decibel level.

Mission accomplished. It just doesn’t get any faster

than the Athlon FX-57/GeForce 7800 GTX SLI pairing,

and by using a Cooler Master Aquagate water cooler,

we can manage the CPU’s heat with a minimum of fan

noise. A tasty terabyte of storage, courtesy of Hitachi’s

Deskstar 500GB hard drives in a RAID 0 array, rounds

out the package nicely.

Without a pair of

videocards this

wouldn’t be a kick-

ass gaming rig. The

two overclocked

GeForce 7800 GTXs

in SLI push the Road

Runner’s gaming

performance into the

stratosphere.

The Athlon FX-57 is

uber-fast, but cool-

ing it can make your

system uber-loud. To

combat the noise, we

equipped our gaming

rig with a Cooler Mas-

ter Aquagate water

cooler. It’s cool and

quiet!

With two 500GB Hitachi Deskstars in a RAID 0 array,

this rig delivers as much space as you’ll need for all

your games, movies, music, and photos with more

than enough space left over for your future needs.

CPU Athlon 64 FX-57 AMD

MOTHERBOARD Asus A8N-SLI Premium Asus

MEMORY 2GB Corsair PC3200 Corsair

VIDEOCARD 2 BFG Tech GeForce 7800 BFG Technologies

GTX OC in SLI

SOUNDCARD Creative Labs Sound Blaster Creative Labs

X-Fi XtremeMusic

HARD DRIVES 2 Hitachi Deskstar 500GB Hitachi Global

Storage Technologies

OPTICAL DRIVE Plextor PX-716SA Plextor

CASE Lian Li PCV-1100 Silverpcs.com

PAINT JOB Road Runner Smooth Creations

POWER SUPPLY Antec 550 Neo HE Antec

LCD MONITOR Viewsonic VX924 Newegg.com and

Viewsonic

SPEAKERS Logitech Z-5500 Logitech

MOUSE Logitech G5 Logitech

CPU COOLER Cooler Master Aquagate Cooler Master

OPERATING Windows XP Pro Microsoft

SYSTEM

SPECS

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