reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized
76 MAXIMUMPC december 2007 december 2007 MAXIMUMPC 77
O
ur first thought upon opening
AVADirect’s new Core 2 Duo SLI
Gaming System was, “Wow, this is
heavy.” Our second, “Oooh, but it’s pretty!”
was followed shortly by a third, “It’s bleed-
ing! ” A cursory inspection revealed that the
system was shipped without one of its two
CPU-cooler hose clamps, and was indeed
leaking AVA’s “bloody red” coolant into the
machine. Disconcerting, to say the least.
We notified AVADirect of the problem, and
they dispatched a tech to fix it. Thereafter,
despite some red residue on one of the
8800’s DVI ports, the rig worked perfectly.
Aside from this initial gaffe, the AVADirect
impressed us with its build quality. The
first thing we saw when we opened the
SilverStone Temjin TJ07 case was a sprawl
of water-cooling tubes running to both GPUs,
the RAM, and the CPU. The aforementioned
“bloody red” cooling fluid is augmented by
four red cold-cathode tubes along the sides
of the acrylic window, lending a fearsome
aspect to the rig’s innards. Cables and wires
were neatly routed along the inside of the
case, but certainly not as neatly as in last
month’s HP Blackbird. The modular 1,200W
Thermaltake Toughpower PSU provides a
ridiculous amount of power while remaining
mostly hidden beneath a partition at the bot-
tom of the case.
AVA certainly makes good use of theTemjin’s seven 5.25-inch external
drive bays; the first two hold an
ArctiCool white-on-blue LCD that
displays system stats like drive
space, CPU, and RAM utilization,
as well as a faux-analog clock.
The next bay holds a Pioneer Blu-
ray reader/DVD burner combo
drive. Two more drive bays
contain the Koolance reservoir
pumps that drive the liquid-cool-
ing system and display per-reservoir
fluid temps, leaving just two bays free.
Does this mess o’ tubes make a
difference? Yep! The max idle temperature
was 35 C, and during our stress tests no
core got above 72 C. Not shabby. And other
than our initial leakage issue, the cooling
system is very neatly installed, routed, and
configured. There are no wasted pipes, and
the whole thing looks terribly impressive.
Maybe too impressive. While we appreci-
ate the thought, most folks would probably
agree that water cooling is overkill for some
of the components—we’re looking at you,
overclocked RAM.
AVA overclocked this machine to the
nines. The Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850
CPU is running at 3.67GHz, up from 3.0GHz,
the dual EVGA e-GeForce 8800 Ultras are
“superclocked” to 655MHz, and even the
OCZ RAM is ratcheted up to 1150MHz. We
tested the rig with our Prime95 stress test,
and detected no stability problems.
The overclocking shows, too. Despite
shipping with Vista (a questionable choice),
the AVADirect blazed through our FEARbenchmark at 184fps, faster than any other
rig we’ve tested. Its Quake score was a
respectable 205fps—nearly twice as fast
as the Blackbird, and right up there with
the fastest XP rigs we’ve seen. What can
we say, except that Nvidia’s OpenGL driver,
even in Vista, is still better than AMD’s.
Performance was top-notch and easily best-
ed our new quad-core zero-point system
(see page 70)—no surprise, as the AVADirect
box sings along at clock speeds 1GHz
higher. Our point of reference against other
rigs is blank, as this is the first machine
tested using our new benchmarks. We did,
however, run our old Photoshop CS2 script
on the AVADirect, and while it’s fast, the rig’s
scores were a bit slower than those of the
recently reviewed Dell and HP PCs.
The rest of the AVADirect’s hardware is
just as high-powered, if not exactly what we
expected. The Asus Xonar D2 soundcard
sounds great and includes color-coded
backlit inputs and plenty of ports, but
no hardware processing. This is the firstAVADirect Core 2 Duo SLI
Gaming System
Blood and thunder!
Pretty lights abound on the AVADirect
Core 2 Duo SLI Gaming System.under the hood
BOOT: 58 sec. DOWN: 24 sec.brAI nSbEAUTYCPU Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad
QX6850 (3.0GHz overclocked
to 3.67GHz)
MOBO Asus Striker Extreme,
nForce 680i SLi
RAM 2GB OCZ Liquid Ready Edition
DDR2/1150
LAN Dual Gigabit LAN
HARD DRIVE Two 150GB Raptors
(10,000rpm SATA) in RAID 0
OPTICAL Pioneer BDC-2202VIDEOCARD Two 768MB eVGA e-GeForce
8800 Ultra in SLI
SOUNDCARD Asus Xonar D2
CASE Silverstone Temjin TJ071,000vista benchmArkS
PrEmIE rE Pro 1,310 seczERO POINT SCORESPHoToSHoP CS3^152 sec
ProSHoW 1,506 sec
mAI nConCEPT 1,448 sec
FEAr 1.07 137 fps
QUAkE 4 135 fps0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%107 sec
1,046 sec
1,065205 fps184 fpsOur current desktop ted bed consists of a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, and 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI motherboard. We are running
two EVGA GeForce 8800GTX cards in SLI mode, Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, LG GGC-H20L, Sound Blaster X-Fi, and PC Power and Cooling
Silencer 750 Quad. OS is Windows Vista Ultimate