reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized
60 MAXIMUMPC april 2007
W
elcome to another edition of
Maximum PC Theater. For our
main attraction this evening, we’re
featuring a play by Vigor Gaming entitled
Force Recon QXN. There’s a scene in act 1 in
which the computer utterly fails to run in any
useful capacity... it brings tears to our eyes.
Be sure you don’t miss it.
Or, rather, do miss the Force Recon QXN.
As has become an unfortunate tradition at
Maximum PC, we
again find ourselves
with a system that
looks sweet on paper
but utterly fails the
quality assurance part
of the benchmarking
process. In layman’s
terms, it does not
work. It fails to boot
consistently. It fails
benchmark runs.
We blame overly
aggressive over-
clocking for this elec-
tronic disaster. Like
those who came before it, Vigor cranked
an Intel QX6700 quad-core processor from
the stock speed of 2.66GHz to a mighty
3.46GHz. But we certainly don’t blame the
company for doing so; in today’s extreme-computing (and non-
multicore-supported)
environment, a stock-
clocked quad-core
processor simply can’t
hold up to dual-core
clock speeds.
If only Vigor had
spent as much time
testing the machine
as it put into its
appearance, we might
have had an actual working computer. This
system is loaded with more tweaks than
any of the similarly configured quad-core
machines we’ve reviewed, so we were a
bit surprised to see lower frame rates in all
of our gaming tests (when they ran). Our
quad-champion Maingear F131 (reviewed in
our January 2007 issue) destroyed the poor
Force Recon by almost 15fps in FEAR and
20fps in Quake 4.
Application testing painfully highlighted
the Force Recon’s stability problems, par-
ticularly our standard video encoding test,
in which we use Nero Recode to transform
a DVD-quality rip of Terminator 2 into an
H.264-based video iPod file. It’s as if the
Force Recon took one look at the project
and decided to head out for a smoke
break. The process took nearly 40 minutes
to complete, almost double the 22-minute
score the Maingear laid down.
We were beginning to wonder if we
should just take this sick machine out back
and shoot it, but the Force Recon didn’t
even make it out the door. The machine
officially died during our Premiere encodingtest. No blue screen, just random restarts.
When SYSmark caused the same prob-
lems, we set all the components back to stock
clock speeds, but the system got progressive-
ly worse. After Force Recon started to reboot
spontaneously, we gave Vigor a call, and the
company sent us a recovery-disc image.
Said recovery disk ended up destroy-
ing what was left of the system. Windows
barely made it to the loading screen before
blue-screening.
The final nail in the Force Recon’s coffin
is that it actually ran slower than all of the
other nonworking systems we’ve tested, at
least in the benchmarks we got to run. That’s
certainly not something to be proud of.
—DAVID MURPHYVigor Gaming
Force Recon QXN
As useful as Sideshow Bob in a field of rakes
See that wiring job? Now that’s quality work. At least your new
footrest will look great.under the hood
BOOT: 39 sec. DOWN: 13 sec.bRAINSbEAUTYThe case itself is quite
pretty, but good luck
lifting the thing. ’Tis a
wee bit heavy.
$4,668, http://www.vigorgaming.comvigor gaming force recon qxnIgNI gNokT
The case looks great, the
front panel looks great, even
the little lit-up feet look great.
boSToN^3
Even when it “works,” it’s worse
than any other quad-core rig
we’ve tested.benchMARkS
SYSmark2004 SE 275zerO p OiNT 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%WNR153 sec
2,338 sec175.8 fps133 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.WNRcpU Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700
(OC’d to 3.46GHz)
MOBO Asus P5N32-E-SLI Nvidia
nForce 680i SLI
rAM 2GB Corsair DDR2 OC’d to
933MHz (two 1GB sticks)
LAN Dual Gigabit LAN
HArD DriVe Two 150GB WD Raptors in
RAID-0, one 500GB WD
(7,200rpm)
OpTicAL NEC 16X dual-layer DVDRW/
24x CDRW)ViDeOcArD Two GeForce 8800 GTXs in SLI
(576MHz core/900MHz RAM)
sOUNDcArD Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic
Platinum
cAse Vigor Force