58 MA XIMUMPC DECEMBER 2005
The Road Runner
Part 1970s-style MOPAR muscle car, part state-of-the-
art computing power—you’re looking at one lust-wor-
thy gaming rig
Take a good look at the Road Runner. Everything about
this mid-tower screams asphalt-shredding speed—
from the hot-rod metallic-orange paint job, to the dual
BFG GeForce 7800 GTX boards running in SLI, to the
water-cooled AMD Athlon 64 FX-57.
We chose the components for this rig with utmost
care, having two goals in mind: the best possible
performance, and a reasonably quiet decibel level.
Mission accomplished. It just doesn’t get any faster
than the Athlon FX-57/GeForce 7800 GTX SLI pairing,
and by using a Cooler Master Aquagate water cooler,
we can manage the CPU’s heat with a minimum of fan
noise. A tasty terabyte of storage, courtesy of Hitachi’s
Deskstar 500GB hard drives in a RAID 0 array, rounds
out the package nicely.
Without a pair of
videocards this
wouldn’t be a kick-
ass gaming rig. The
two overclocked
GeForce 7800 GTXs
in SLI push the Road
Runner’s gaming
performance into the
stratosphere.
The Athlon FX-57 is
uber-fast, but cool-
ing it can make your
system uber-loud. To
combat the noise, we
equipped our gaming
rig with a Cooler Mas-
ter Aquagate water
cooler. It’s cool and
quiet!
With two 500GB Hitachi Deskstars in a RAID 0 array,
this rig delivers as much space as you’ll need for all
your games, movies, music, and photos with more
than enough space left over for your future needs.
CPU Athlon 64 FX-57 AMD
MOTHERBOARD Asus A8N-SLI Premium Asus
MEMORY 2GB Corsair PC3200 Corsair
VIDEOCARD 2 BFG Tech GeForce 7800 BFG Technologies
GTX OC in SLI
SOUNDCARD Creative Labs Sound Blaster Creative Labs
X-Fi XtremeMusic
HARD DRIVES 2 Hitachi Deskstar 500GB Hitachi Global
Storage Technologies
OPTICAL DRIVE Plextor PX-716SA Plextor
CASE Lian Li PCV-1100 Silverpcs.com
PAINT JOB Road Runner Smooth Creations
POWER SUPPLY Antec 550 Neo HE Antec
LCD MONITOR Viewsonic VX924 Newegg.com and
Viewsonic
SPEAKERS Logitech Z-5500 Logitech
MOUSE Logitech G5 Logitech
CPU COOLER Cooler Master Aquagate Cooler Master
OPERATING Windows XP Pro Microsoft
SYSTEM
SPECS
PART DONOR
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