reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized
64 MAXIMUMPC january 2007 january 2007 MAXIMUMPC 65
ing games come along, you’ll be ready; the
GeForce 8800s already support DirectX 10,
so you’ll be prepared for Crysis and Hellgate
London , as well as games like Company
of Heroes that will be updated to support
DirectX 10 later this year.
Plus, you could always tweak the
speed of the included videocards. While
we didn’t get one—much to our sad-
ness—Maingear says it’s now shipping
the F131 with overclocked 8800 GTXs. We
have to ding the machine slightly for its
setup upon arrival: a CPU voltage issue
prevented us from successfully running
our full benchmark suite at first. However,
Maingear deserves props for sending us a
fix for the voltage problem remotely, just afew hours after we sent a puzzled email.
As for the makeup of the case itself, we
feel that the system’s blue paint job is just
average. The lame “MAINGEAR” sticker run-
ning vertically down the case’s side further
loses the rig style points.
On the inside, though, the F131 is a
tight ship. Components and cables are
well-hidden, and two huge-ass, crazy-loud
140mm fans suck air in and out the case.
We question why Maingear didn’t just go
for a total water-cooled setup, especially
since Maingear used a Coolit Freezone to
chill the CPU.
Still, when you’re running with a frame
rate in the hundreds on some of today’s
most punishing games, we doubt that fannoise will be much of a concern. You’re
certainly getting what you pay for with
the F131. With just a wee bit of additional
tweaking, this machine would be perfect.
—DaviD Murphy$6,497, http://www.maingear.commaingear f131roaD runner
Oh man, PC gaming
doesn’t get much speedier
than this.
coyote
A wee loud, no OC’d video-
cards, and no Raid. Boo-urns
to the big case sticker.9
MAXIMUMPC
KICKASS