reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED
64 MAXIMUMPC JANUARY 2007 JANUARY 2007 MAXIMUMPC 65
H
oo-hoo! That’s an exact recreation
of the noise we made when opening
the box containing Maingear’s F131
desktop rig. But “rig” might be too generic
a description for the bright-blue machine;
“behemoth” seems more appropriate. For in
every direction—processor power, graphics,
and even the freakin’ weight of the beast—
the F131 seems to dwarf its competition.
But while the F131 will always hold a
special place in our heart as the fi rst quad-
core machine to give the Maximum PC Lab
its number, the experience was a wee bit
short of a perfect date. The F131 is fast—oh,
is it fast—but do its assets justify $6,500
worth of hard-earned cash? If you’re a play-
er—a game player, that is.
As mentioned, the F131 rolls with a
quad-core setup on top of an EVGA moth-
erboard running Nvidia’s nForce 680i SLI
chipset. The four cores on the Intel Core
2 Extreme QX6700 let you run either one
multithreaded app or four resource-hogging,
single-threaded applications concurrently
at 2.66GHz. But if that’s the ice cream, then
Maingear’s overclock to 3.47GHz is the
sweet, sweet fudgy topping.
Instead of sprinkles, Maingear drops two,
sugary lumps into the mix: a pair of GeForce
8800 GTX cards in an SLI confi guration.
Add in two 1GB sticks of Corsair Dominator
DDR2 RAM running at 1,155MHz, and yourgaming dreams are absolutely
answered. The F131 spit out
nigh-unbelievable numbers
in our benchmarks, charging
through FEAR at 146 frames
per second, and nearly hitting
200fps in Quake 4. That’s hella
fast, yo, and it beats the current
record-holder, Dell’s XPS 700
(103fps for FEAR and 153fps for Quake 4 ).
We’re inclined to believe that the insane
gaming performance is mainly a result of
the Nvidia cards. On the applications side,
the F131 made a nice little sploosh, but it
hardly blew its competitors out of the water.
In fact, the system clocked speeds compa-
rable to some of the other high-performance
machines we’ve tested—including PCs run-
ning Intel Core 2 Extremes at stock-clock
levels with RAIDed hard drives.
Whenever the F131 topped a machine in
our Photoshop test, it typically fell behind in
our Premiere Pro benchmark, or vice versa.
SYSmark scores were similarly unimpressive.
It’s not that they weren’t fast, we just didn’t
see as big of a competitive boost for applica-
tions as we saw for gaming. We attribute this
mainly to the simple fact that the F131’s two
hard drives are linked up SATA 2-style, not in
a RAID confi guration. Sure, you get nearly a
terabyte of space—900 gigs, to be specifi c—
but at the expense of some speed.
Of course, we ran these benchmarks in
an environment that’s yet to technologically
realize the wonders of quad-core perfor-
mance. Most of today’s applications are
optimized to run on a single thread; the few
that venture beyond that wall really only dipinto dual-thread territory. Once truly mul-
tithreaded applications (and games) come
along, we expect the overclocked Maingear
to utterly destroy the benchmarks of its
dual-core brethren.
You’re basically investing in a the future
when you shell out $6,500 for the F131. But
that’s a good thing, as the machine’s plenty
capable of handling just about anything you
throw at it today. And when more demand-Maingear F131
So fast, it made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs
The case’s paint job may be a bit ho-
hum, but it’s what’s inside that mat-
ters most: raw, overclocked speed.
And pretty lights.UNDER THE HOOD
BOOT: 35 sec. DOWN: 15 sec.BRAINSBEAUTYTwo Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX cards power
the F131’s punishing FPS count, and
they’re more than ready for DirectX 10.CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700
(OC’d to 3.47GHz)
MOBO EVGA Nvidia nForce 680i SLI
RAM 2GB Corsair (two 1GB sticks)
LAN Dual Gigabit LAN
HARD One 150GB Raptor,
DRIVES (10,000rpm SATA), one 750GB
Seagate (7,200rpm SATA)
OPTICAL Plextor PX-760A 18x Double-Layer
DVDRWVIDEOCARD Two GeForce 8800 GTXs in
SLI (576MHz core/900MHz RAM)
SOUNDCARD Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic
CASE MaingearBENCHMARKS
SYSmark2004 SE 275ZERO POINT SCORESPremiere Pro 2.0^3000 sec
Photoshop CS2 295 sec
Recode H.264 2648 sec
FEAR 1.07 80 fps
Quake 4 110.5 fps0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%414
1,666.6 sec
181 sec
1,333 sec194.4 fps146 fpsOur 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.