reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED
62 MA XIMUMPC MARCH 2006
W
hat do you do when your brand is
universally recognized as being so
crazy-low-priced that consumers
ignore you when searching for something
more upscale? You add a “luxury” sub-brand.
If it worked for Toyota with Lexus maybe it’ll
work for iBuypower with its AeonCraft brand.
In execution,
AeonCraft makes an
admirable attempt to
set itself apart from its
parent company by
doing something iBuy-
power wouldn’t normally
do. To keep the CPU
cool, AeonCraft uti-
lizes an exclusive new
water-cooling system.
Very similar to Cooler
Master’s Aquagate Mini,
AeonCraft’s solution is
also a two-piece, mainte-
nance-free unit. The Lexa
rig also sports the new
and fast Athlon 64 FX-
60 dual-core processor,
and an Asus A8N32-SLI
motherboard complete
with two x16 PCI Express slots for graph-
ics cards. AeonCraft even throws in a pair
of eVGA 256MB GeForce 7800 GTX KO
videocards and an X-Fi soundcard. Three of
those components top our monthly “Best
of the Best” list, and the FX-60 pretty much
steamrolled Intel’s newest dual-core in lastmonth’s CPU feature
story. The icing on a
pretty tasty-looking
cake is the BenQ
DVD burner, which
supports LightScribe.
Alas, it’s not
just the parts that
make a PC. Like we
said, AeonCraft’s
Lexa is an admi-
rable attempt, but
it doesn’t automati-
cally punt the com-
pany into the boutique-chic neighborhood.
The pair of Raptor hard drives would be
more compelling had AeonCraft gotten its
hands on Western Digital’s new super-fast
150GB Raptors. That would have given the
Lexa deadly HD speeds and 300GB of stor-
age. As it stands, the two 74GB Raptors in
the AeonCraft leave you with less than 150GB
—Senator, we know people whose laptops
have more storage than that.
On the performance tip, the FX-60/SLI
combo pulls no punches. With updated
GeForce drivers that don’t retard SYSmark
2005 scores (see our CPU showdown in
the February issue for details), we saw the
AeonCraft pull down a shockingly fast score
of 273. That doesn’t eclipse the record set
by Falcon Northwest’s Mach V (reviewed in
February), but it’s the fastest we’ve seen from a
non-overclocked production machine. Is it any
wonder that the other (Intel-based) machine we
had lined up for review bowed out this month?
The Lexa’s gaming scores were neck-and-
neck with the FX-57-powered HyperSonic
machine we pawed in October. That’s to be
expected—the single-core 2.8GHz FX-57 is
simply faster in single-threaded gaming apps
than the dual-core 2.6GHz FX-60. Photoshopand Premiere Pro performance was right at
the front of the pack.
Our biggest problem with the Lexa is
in presentation. A machine that costs four
large, should sport an internal wiring job
that’s tighter than a gunnery sergeant’s rack.
The Lexa’s wiring is anything but. In fact,
it’s so messy, you’d almost have to plan it
that way. The odd thing is that AeonCraft
includes a window on the case so you can
clearly see the unkempt innards. Perhaps
messy is the new tidy?
Inattention to details puts a serious dent
in AeonCraft’s attempt to move beyond the
white-box crowd. It’s not a fatal mistake,
but we expect more from a company that’s
catering to the power-user crowd, and asking
power-user prices.
—GORDON UNGAeonCraft Lexa
One part Lexus, one part Camry
A work in progress? The AeonCraft gets the prize for being the
untidiest PC we’ve seen in months.The AeonCraft Lexa
surfs the border
between generic
white-box machines
and high-end bou-
tique-vendor rigs.
5NDER T(E (OOD
BRAINSBEAUTY273
554 sec
240 sec
1776 sec100 fps"ENC(MARKS
SYS mark 2004 201ZERO POINT SCORESPremiere Pro 620 sec
Photoshop CS 286 sec
Divx Encode 1812 sec
3D Mark05 29.3 fps
Doom 3 77. 1 fps0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Our zero-point reference systems uses a 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-55, 2GB of DDR400 Crucial Ballistix RAM, two nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in SLI, a Maxtor 250GB
DiamondMax10, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, a PC Power and Cooling TurboCool 510 Deluxe Express, and Windows XP Pro with SP2.56.2 fps!EONCR!FT ,EX!LEAF BLOWER
Who can be down on dual-
core FX-60 and two 7800
GTXs in SLI?
RAKE
8Wiring job by Don King’s
hair stylist.$3,945, http://www.aeoncraft.comCPU AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (2.6GHz
dual core)
MOBO Asus A8N32-SLI (nForce4 X16)
RAM 2GB Corsair (two 1GB sticks)
LAN Dual Gigabit LAN
(Intel and nVidia)
HARD DRIVE Two 74GB Raptors (10,000rpm
SATA) in RAID 0
OPTICAL BenQ DW1625 DVD+/-RW (dual
layer with LightScribe),
Sony DDU 1615 DVD-ROMVIDEOCARD Two eVGA GeForce 7800 GTX KO,
256MB in SLI (490MHz core,
650MHz RAM)
SOUNDCARD Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music
CASE NZXT Lexa gaming tower
BOOT: 34 sec. DOWN: 12 sec.