MaximumPC 2007 02

reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized

64 MAXIMUMPC february 2007 february 2007 MAXIMUMPC 65

out at an average of 147fps, Quake 4 was

a few frames faster at 193.8fps, and our

Photoshop , Premiere , and Nero Recode

benchmarks actually ran to completion. We

patted ourselves on the back and started an

overnight run of SYSmark.

And when we walked into the Lab the next

morning, we were once again greeted with a

chorus of graphical anomalies—not only did

the system crash, but this time, it refused to

display anything but a trippy collage, even

after a cold boot. We clocked the system back

to stock values, pointed a house fan at the

graphics cards, and crossed our fingers. Go

figure, SYSmark ran perfectly.

But this was more an exercise in futil-

ity than anything else. We could talk all day

about the X8’s noteworthy performance and

its amazing specs. We could write up a storm

about its beautiful Gigabyte case and its

water-cooling setup, which complements the

case’s blue-lit theme. And we’re still salivat-

ing over the price. The X8 is nearly $2,000

cheaper than last month’s Maingear, with

performance equitable to—and in some cases

topping—the machine we dubbed “the fastest

ever benchmarked.”

Unfortunately, the X8 left both us and

ABS, which was given multiple opportuni-

ties to troubleshoot the system, completely

dumbfounded. The X8 just goes to show

that even the best of the best are fallible

without a little foresight.

—DAVID MURPHY

$4,635, http://www.abs.com

ABS ultimAte x8 iii

tHe wolf

One of the fastest (if not

the fastest) machines we’ve

tested.

MARVIn^4

Does. Not. Work. In fact, it

doesn’t work in ways an average user would

likely never notice; that’s even worse.

the X8 had one of

the nicest wiring

jobs we’ve seen in a

while. Unfortunately,

we butchered it

while attempting

repairs on the rig.

BenchMARks

sYsmark 2004 se 275

zero point scores

Premiere Pro 2.0 3,000^ sec

Photoshop Cs2 295 sec

Recode H.264 2,648 sec

feAR 1.07 80 fps

Quake 4 110.5 fps

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

372

1,595 sec

154 sec

1,337 sec

193.8 fps

147 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.