reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized
64 MAXIMUMPC february 2007 february 2007 MAXIMUMPC 65
O
ne of our favorite scenes in Pulp
Fiction takes place when Samuel
L. Jackson’s character, the ever-
so-eloquent Jules Winnfield, describes
the wonderful gourmet taste of his friend
Jimmie’s coffee. Of course, Jules and his
partner have just pulled up to Jimmie’s
house with a body blasted all over the
backseat of their car. But for the briefest of
moments, nothing else mattered, save for
the sweet flavor of something that wasn’t
freeze-dried Taster’s Choice.
ABS’s Ultimate X8 III might not be a
splattered corpse, but it’s hard to appreciate
the machine’s deliciousness when the rig
comes with problems of such unbelievable
proportions. On paper, the X8 looks amaz-
ing; in reality, this rig is far from it.
In that context, writing about the specs
and performance of the machine just makes
us feel bad. Thinking about the guts of the
X8 reminds us of that time—so long ago—
when we opened the box and got our first
glimpse of the system’s potential.
We’re really not trying to taunt you,
but you have to understand our predica-
ment. Who wouldn’t be excited by the
chance to put an Intel QX6700-based
quad-core system—overclocked from
2.6GHz to 3.47GHz—that’s also paired
with two GeForce 8800 GTX cards in an
oh-so-sweet SLI configuration throughits paces. While the cards
are at stock-clock speeds,
that’s probably a good
thing—any faster, and this
rig might catch on fire. Two
sticks of 1GB Corsair RAM
round out the equation on
the gaming end, and two
140GB 10,000rpm hard
drives give you a lot of
space (and speed) to work
with. This system isn’t just
a great cup of coffee; it’s
a Big Gulp. You can only
imagine our surprise when our initial round
of benchmarks registered scores we’d
expect from a much less worthy machine.
Our first FEAR test pulled in a whopping
(not!) 32 frames per second. That’s less than
a single 8800 card should be capable of, let
alone two working together. Something was
clearly amiss. When Quake 4 showed similar
performance peculiarities, we resorted to
Maximum PC Fix-It Technique #1: reseating
hardware. We plugged and replugged, seated
everything, and made sure that every possible
connection was as connected as it could be.
And all was well.
Or so we thought. Our second run of
Quake 4 yielded double the performance
of the first, capping out at an average of
191fps. That’s the kind of result we expect-ed to see on a machine of this caliber,
which made us all the more excited to see
what the rig would score in the more-pun-
ishing FEAR benchmark. And we weren’t
disappointed; we’ve never seen FEAR
crash with such an interesting display of
black graphical artifacts, and the psyche-
delic light show, which replaced the famil-
iar BIOS load screen, was unexpected but
neat looking. Not so good for ABS though.
ABS suggested we restore the image and
assured us that the system it shipped was
pulling scores of near 17,000 in 3DMark06 ,
and 256fps in Doom 3. And we believe
it—after we swapped the videocards and
finished a second round of cable-jiggling,
we were getting comparable results in
3DMark06. Our FEAR benchmark cappedABS Ultimate X8 III
A BS experience—the X8 promises so much, yet delivers so little
Looks are certainly deceiving. Everything about the system
is perfect, right up until the moment you boot.We don’t know why you need a fan this big on top of your water block, although it does
do a nice job of keeping the electronics around your CPU socket cool.under the hood
CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700
(OC’d to 3.47GHz)
MOBO EVGA Nvidia nForce 680i SLI
RAM 2GB Corsair (two 1GB sticks)
DDR2/800
LAN Dual Gigabit LAN
HARD Two 140GB Western Digital
DRIVES (10,000rpm SATA) in a Raptor
RAID-0 configuration
OPTICAL Sony 16x DVD-ROM, Samsung
18X SuperMulti Dual-Layer DVD
Burner w/ LightscribeVIDEOCARD Two GeForce 8800 GTXs in
SLI (576MHz core/900MHz RAM)
SOUNDCARD Integrated RealTek Audio
CASE Gigabyte
BOOT: 37 sec DOWN: 22 secbrainsbEaUTY