82 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC|NOV 08 |www.maximumpc.com
IN THE LAB^
REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWAREY
ou want power? You got it. The beastly
Benchmark Crusher from Digital Storm
provides stellar performance and a work-
out all in one package. A few bench presses with
this machine will whip you into tip-top shape
in no time. Inside this heft y package are enough
high-end performance parts to make any hard-
core gamer wet his pants.
The machine’s black and white color scheme
is eye-catching. Digital Storm coats the interior
and exterior of a SilverStone TJ09 with a high-
gloss automotive fi nish, resulting in a smooth
and scratch-resistant surface. While the paint
job isn’t fl awless—a few noticeable nicks ap-
pear here and there—the three GeForce GTX
280s located inside defi nitely make up for it.
Yes, that’s right, three.
With three GeForce GTX 280s in tri-SLI run-
ning soundly in unison, this rig sailed through
every one of our benchmarks. This is easily
one of the fastest systems we’ve ever tested.
To complement the system’s speed, Digital
Storm confi gured two 300GB Western Digital
Velociraptors in RAID 0 alongside a 1TB Western
Digital Caviar for all your storing pleasure.
The heart and soul of the rig, a Core 2
Extreme QX9770 processor, resides under a
Liquid Chilled FrostBite water-cooling kit. As if
the QX9770 wasn’t fast enough at stock speeds, Digital Storm cranked up the voltage and raised
the CPU speed to 4.2GHz, 200MHz more than
the Core 2 in the CyberPower Gamer Ultimate
SLI Quad we reviewed in July. The Benchmark
Crusher’s 200MHz speed advantage facilitated
noticeable—albeit not substantial—perfor-
mance gains in both application and gaming
benchmarks. In Crysis, the Benchmark Crusher’s
scores were similar to the very fast CyberPower
rig’s, and its UT3 numbers were slightly faster.
Why no massive frame-rate increase? Our stan-
dard resolution test of 1920x1200 isn’t enough
to push three 280 GTX cards. These cards beg for
30-inch panels, so we obliged.
Unfortunately, during our monitor switch,
the Crusher’s motherboard crapped out. DigitalStorm quickly replaced the board, and we were
up and running at 2560x1600.
At that resolution, even the mighty tri-SLI
confi guration took a hit, going from 54fps to
20fps in Crysis. What can we say except that
the game is a GPU tormenter of immense
proportions. The tri-SLI, however, suff ered no
problems with UT3’s less graphically intense
engine, which was not impacted by moving
from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600. Not at all.
From its outstanding performance to its
eye-catching paint job, this rig impressed us.
But with its bank-draining price tag ($9,255)
and marginal performance gains over the
CyberPower rig, is it worth crushing your
wallet to get one? –B E N S O N H O N GDigital Storm Benchmark Crusher
It’s good at crushing. Just make sure you’re not the one who’s crushed
This rig’s tri-SLI setup is massive. We’re surprised there’s room for the Asus Xonar D2X.VERDICT$9,255, http://www.digitalstormonline.com9
Incredibly fast; nice
Storm Trooper aes-
thetic.This rig is mon-
strously heavy, noisy,
and expensive.WALL-EDIGITAL STORM BENCHMARK CRUSHERSONNYSPECIFICATIONS
PROCESSOR Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770
([email protected])
MOBO XFX nForce 790i SLI Ultra
RAM 4GB Corsair Dominator DDR3/1333 @
2000MHz
VIDEOCARD Three EVGA GeForce GTX 260 in SLI
SOUNDCARD Asus Xonar D2X PCI-E
STORAGE Two WD Velociraptor 300GB in RAID 0,
one WD Caviar 1TB
OPTICAL Lite On Blu-ray DH4B1S, Lite-On DH
20A4H DVD burner
CASE/PSU Digital Storm 950Si/Corsair HX
1000Wout all in one package. A few bench presses withVelociraptors in RAID 0 alongside a 1TB WesternZERO POINT
1,260 sec
150 sec
1,415 sec
1,872 sec
26 fps
83 fpsOur current desktop test bed consists of a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI motherboard. We run two EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX cards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound
Blaster X-Fi soundcard, a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad PSU, and Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit.Premiere Pro CS3
Photoshop CS3
Proshow
MainConcept
Crysis
Unreal Tournament 3
0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%VISTA 64-BIT BENCHMARKS667 667 sec(+112%)(+112%)
1,168 secsec136 fps557 557 sec(+126%)(+126%)
73 73 sec(+105%)(+105%)54 fps(+108%)(+108%)