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Hardware

Systemax to Offer 'Hot-Rod' PC 170

Posted by CmdrTaco from the if-you're-to-lazy-to-do-it-yourself dept.
Professor_Quail writes "C|Net News reports that PC maker Systemax is going to be offering a new line of PC's aimed at gamers and performance enthusiasts. The computers, priced at approximately 3-4 thousand dollars, are touted by the company specifically for their overclocking performance; the DoubleX line comes equipped with a water-cooling system and dual hard drives configured with RAID-0. The systems will be sold through the company's TigerDirect subsidiary."
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Systemax to Offer 'Hot-Rod' PC More

Systemax to Offer 'Hot-Rod' PC

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  • Yes, I realize the high-end gaming systems fetch a hefty profit margin, but isn't Alienware [alienware.com] the standard retailer for such systems?

    I think reputation has a lot to do with sales success, so it may be hard for Systemax to break into Alienware's marketshare. The watercooling option is definitely a step in the right direction; I'm pretty sure no system retailer has attempted such an offer.
    • Ok i dont see how this article is news. As you mentioned companies likeAlienware already make hot-rod pc's. But now everyone and their uncle are mkaing a hot-rod pc. Just because systemax is in it now doesn't mean anything. I think that the market is about to become saturated with these companies and we will see some of them kick off, most likely the new ones without a name in the business.
  • In its labs, Systemax claims, it pushed the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 to more than 3GHz and also cranked up the Athlon XP 2200+ chip, which runs at 1.8GHz, to 3GHz
    Really?
    • They're not politicians. Why would they lie?

      Oh wait, they're PC manufacturers.
    • That's probably just a stupid cnet error. They probably meant 2 ghz. 3 ghz athlon xp (rated at 1.8 ghz) is beyond ridiculous.
    • And with my current affliction with strategy games, that should make my copy of Moonbase Commander, Brood War, and Zeus run at a blistering 7 hojillion FPS.

      Honestly people, we need to tell these people to patch the retail release IN THE BOX BEFORE I GET IT, and not worry so much about setting three programmers to really solve the "problem" with that pesky realistic-looking-liquified-guts-sliding-down-the- walls effect that is so damnably elusive.

      Well, I for one want gameplay. Most people do. That is why right now my wife is having an affair and is about to leave me for an Italian plumber from the mushroom kingdom. You should hear the answering machine messages. Half of my caller ID logs come from the Koopa kingdom.

      Really people. Get a grip. Its almost as though game companies hire a bunch of obsessed nerds and then forget their target market, purpose of the game, most people's systems requirements, and their budget releasing some crap into the world that... oh.

      Nevermind.

  • Yeah, right (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I would *never* buy a system from Tiger Direct. My work used to buy stuff from them a lot and they really suck.

  • Erm, no. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 29, 2002 @09:02AM (#4353292)
    Water-cooling has not been shown in tests to give statistically significant improvements in cooling vs. a high-end fan and heatsink (the primary advantage of water-cooling is it is quieter, but that isn't a performance issue), and overclocking is primarily a way for tinkerhead geeks to get more mileage out of old processors.

    The hard drives are a nice touch, but any slashdot reader could build a system whose perfomance equals this overpriced iron and have enough left over for a hooker, a bottle of Courvissier, and a pack of Sheiks. The primary market for these bells-and-whistles systems will be late adopters with more money than brains and a tendency to be easily distracted by "the shiny".

  • Evaluate Tiger Direct on your own (Score:4, Informative)

    by Crazieeman ( 610662 ) on Sunday September 29, 2002 @09:03AM (#4353293) Journal
    Customer reviews of Tiger Direct [resellerratings.com]
    • http://www.consumeraffairs.com/computers/tiger_dir ect.htm [consumeraffairs.com].

      doesn't look too good.. but then again, if you're a performance enthuasist would you pay 1000-2000 extra for something worth 100$-200$. watercooling can be had for 100$ and 400 will get you vapochill/mx3-eva type cooling(and the raid hd's and other stuff isn't worth it even unless you're unable to read, in which case buying a computer isn't very useful)..
    • Pretty funny. I ordered one item from Tigerdirect which I had to cancel because it was out of stock even though their support people were pretty sure it was.. well, a month later and I gave up.

      That was about a year ago and I'm still getting the catalogs. What a waste of money printing and sending a catalog to a consumer that will never use their service [again]

      I actually do read the catalogs to see what's new and stuff and I saw this Symetac system for about 3k. It didn't seem that bad until I realized the flat screen monitor wasn't included. What a rip.
    • [looks at ratings] Yup, that's typical for 'em. I always advise people to run away screaming and buy ANYwhere else. They are the Fry's of catalog merchants.

  • Price spectrum (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Matey-O ( 518004 ) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Sunday September 29, 2002 @09:03AM (#4353294) Homepage Journal
    Anybody else see the irony in comparing THIS machine to the $199 Walmart/Lindows/AOL machine?

    $199 to 'three or four thousand dollars' is quite the spread for two items that, at a certain level, are more alike than different.
    • How about comparing this machine to a $199 PS2 or $199 XBox? Is it really that much better for action game-play?

      Seems like a tiny niche market -- folks with too much money and too much time to think about how they spend either.
  • 2,800 USD for this thing? you could buy all the components for approximately 1000, it doesn't even mention dual processors, which I would expect for this kind of money, and I imagine the only part that would be any trouble to assemble is the water-cooling system. the only reason i would pay for this is maybe the warranty factor, but you could buy components retail w/ a 3 or more year warranty and still come in well under that figure.
    though I might be talking out my ass for the newer P4's, since I haven't been CPU-shopping in a few months.
    • Water cooling is not very easy... Can easily damage your circuits. Even if there is no leaks condensation can be a huge problem. If they cand do it safely then this is an excellent product for those that can't or don't have the time to. Also please don't spread this B.S. about $1000 dollars for the same things. It's simply not true when it comes to pc's. Usually you'll get cheap no name parts and you still won't get there.
    • the only reason i would pay for this is maybe the warranty

      How do you even begin to attempt to warranty a system which you blantantly overclock beyond the cpu's normal parameters.

      joe schmoe: "hello tech support, my 2.8ghz overclocked to 3ghz is fried"

      tech support: "Why did you overclock it?"

      Joe: "Because that's why I paid 4k dollars for an l33t system that I probably could have built for myself for 100 bucks."

      Tech support: "Yeah.. I'm going to have to ask you to not call us again."

  • Overclocking? Who cares (Score:3, Insightful)

    by I Am The Owl ( 531076 ) on Sunday September 29, 2002 @09:08AM (#4353304) Homepage Journal
    Why would anyone bother overclocking with today's processors? The clock increase gained by it will be surpassed in a few weeks by a new processor release anyway, which is a testament to how ineffective it is these days. It's about % gain, man. Maybe in the days of the old Celeron 300 chips, where you could more than double your clockspeed, at the expense of processor life, this was effective, but I can't see there being any financial reason to do it now.
    • People don't overclock necessarily to gain performance, it just happens to be a general inherient benefit. It's done because it's a hobby that fuffils a person's interest in some way, be it challenging, cool, or interesting. To take something and run it it faster than it's intended is a 'geeks' way of fun (perhaps even their way of living on the edge ... i'm not a geek). This is similar to any mechanic or rice boy that modifies their car not necessarily by dropping new components into it, but tweeking for better performance..

      You're right when you say how ineffective it is these days in a monetary vs performance % gain ... but then again, how many people really push their 2.8 MHz P4 to it's limits?

      These boxes are most likely going to be aimed that rich kid with lots of money, that lacks the desire to learn to do it themselves.

      Just a thought ...
      Just a thought...
    • Just FYI, I have a Celeron 300a @450 and a dual Celeron 333 @500. Still in use. Still going strong.

      Meanwhile, two VP6s with dual PIIIs running at rated speed are dead.

      Hardware seems to be getting less and less dependable as we push the envelope on speed and heat.

    • You're absolutely right. In the old days you could get some noticeable peformance gain in Quake when you overclocked your cpu. However, in my experience, the system wasn't very reliable.

      These days, it pays to get a mid level cpu and spend the extra cash on the video card.
    • Funny, I just overclocked a 1.6ghz P4 to 2.13ghz with the retail heatsink and fan.

      It hasn't been rebooted in nearly 2 months.

      Now compare the price/performance difference between a 1.6ghz/400FSB P4 and a 2.13ghz/533FSB P4.

      Looks like a bargain to me.

    • I would. A $145 1.8a overclocked to 2.6-2.7 on stock voltage (or very close to it) with the retail heatsink/fan? Thats a damn good deal-about $300 savings at the least.
    • Why would anyone bother overclocking with today's processors? The clock increase gained by it will be surpassed in a few weeks by a new processor release anyway, which is a testament to how ineffective it is these days.


      You're ignoring the money factor. It's not a matter of "let's push a brand new bleeding edge chip to a speed they won't match for 'a few weeks'", it's a matter of "let's buy a slightly older chip which can be clocked up to better performance and save some money which can then go to a better video card/faster hard drive etc."

      My main question about this article is how they plan to warranty a system that they encourage overclocking on...
    • The problem with overclocking are the overclockers themselves. "Yeah, I'm really sticking it to the man!" "They're trying to defraud us on these chips!" "That's how they get you, dude, they underrepresent the chips true speed so they can rip you off" Gah, it's just so pathetic.

    • Re:Overclocking? Who cares (Score:4, Informative)

      by Sean Clifford ( 322444 ) on Sunday September 29, 2002 @06:05PM (#4355434) Journal
      I have to agree with you here. My old BX-6R2 based box finally bit the big one at a LAN party. It started life as a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450.

      With a 50% increase in clock speed, overclocking was well worth it. Even when I spent almost as much on my cooling solution as I did on the processor ($55 for former, $65 for latter). It let me build a system I was happy with for 2+ years at an unbeatable price.

      Later, I went to a 800MHz Celeron. Just as I was considering pushing it to a 1.8GHz Celeron through an upgradeware [tomshardware.com] upgrade, a fellow LANner managed to snap two capacitors off my motherboard and fry the whole box. (Don't ask how - and no, he's not going to pony up).

      I just didn't see the point in upgrading my box except with processor b/c I was maxed with 1GB of RAM and the box performed (almost) flawlessly. Need ATA-133, pop in a card. Yeah, I only had AGP 2x, but I held my own fraggin' with a low-end GeForce2. If it hadn't been for the accident, I wouldn't have upgraded.

      Now I'm the proud owner of a Shuttle SS51G [shuttleonline.com]-based system. With a DVD-burner, a smokin' WD 120GB drive, and a GeForce4 Ti 4600 w/VIVO. I wanted to wait for the Athlon/nForce2 based systems to come out in October, but I had a dead box and couldn't really wait. Being an old-school overclocker, I decided to see how far the CPU would go:

      I started with a stock 2.4GHz rev B Pentium 4 and cranked it up to 2.52GHz. Went a tad higher, but had to clear CMOS and start over. When I benchmarked the system at different speeds, there was negligible difference. Why make the extra heat? Bah.

      My system absolutely smokes. I'm extremely happy and if current trends continue, I won't feel the need to replace this box for another 3-4 years. And the size is perfect for toting to LAN parties. Now I just need a sweet LCD monitor without tracies....

  • $1000 at NewEgg (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    will give you 90% of the experience of some absurd $3000 pc.

  • Why post this? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "News" like this seems more like an advertisement. Are they an OSDN company? :-)
  • "But gaming is moving more into the mainstream now, so we think it's a market we can capture.

    Despite some good PC titles, gaming has been trending towards consoles, which cost $200 each. Even with green lights and water cooling $4000 is just way to much. You can still buy systems, which you could pop the latest motherboard in with a faster Athlon or P4 and play fast enough for less than $1500, fully kitted with DVD/CDRW, and all. Maybe they're targeting the rich kids, you know, the ones who never get invited to LAN parties.

    "If you don't let me play, I'll take my server straight home!"

    • You are making a couple of mistakes here.

      One is that gaming is moving towards the console. If that was true then the x-box being the closest to a pc would have selled like hot-cakes. It didn't.

      Two is that $XXXX is to much, it all depends on what youre income is.

      Three is that you presume pc games are mostly played by kids when in fact the average age hovers around 30 and many older people are starting to pick up games as well.

      Four is that everyone is willing to spend the time building their own system. For some people the extra cost is easily offset by the ease of getting it out of the box.

      Youre response sound a bit like you are jealous of people that would have the kind of money to buy this. Get over it. And if you can build the same system for less, well then open youre own bussiness and compete with them.

      • Was this a troll, well, maybe not, but I'll address a few items...

        One is that gaming is moving towards the console. If that was true then the x-box being the closest to a pc would have selled like hot-cakes. It didn't.

        Yes, games have moved to the Console, more consoles sell than ever before and I can't find anywhere near the number of game titles for PC's that I can for Consoles. The notable exception is there are some much higher quality games for the PC's than you can play on consoles, but in shear numbers Consoles win. Don't confuse the Likeness to PC's of the Xbox with what should come out for it, it's hardly an open platform, with Microsoft willing to defend exclusive rights of development (i.e. DMCA smackdown for reverse engineering, etc.), thus they get a cut of ever title, same way Sony and Nintendo work.

        Two is that $XXXX is to much, it all depends on what youre income is.

        No, $4K is in excess of what's needed for a high performance gaming PC. I've been pricing parts to build my own (not particularly for gaming) and $1000-1500 is plenty. What they offer is the same as Gucci does, you can buy a handbag at Kmart or buy a Gucci, they both function equally.

        Three is that you presume pc games are mostly played by kids when in fact the average age hovers around 30 and many older people are starting to pick up games as well.

        Didn't say anything about kids as the predominant market for games, even I know better than that and I'm pretty stupid at times. The PC with all the lights and gewgaws is most likely to appeal to the less initiated, whereas the more experienced gamer, particularly those with DIY connections save their money for games, not buying glitz.

        Four is that everyone is willing to spend the time building their own system. For some people the extra cost is easily offset by the ease of getting it out of the box.

        You can buy a pretty high end PC right off the shelf from Dell, CompUSA, Circuit City, etc. for much less if you don't want to build. $2400-4000 (4000 being the one with the 240+gig of drives and liquid cooling) Read any magazines lately? The prices I'm seeing reflect some resepectable horsepower at a reasonable price. Just slap in your 128Meg graphic card and you're off and running.

        Youre response sound a bit like you are jealous of people that would have the kind of money to buy this. Get over it. And if you can build the same system for less, well then open youre own bussiness and compete with them.

        I'm sometimes jealous of people who have more money, but I'm rarely so of people who flaunt money or blow it stupidly.

        Now, if you'd have actually RTFA you would have seen I'm not alone in my opinions:

        Sean Aryai, a marketing director at Systemax could be quoted verbatim as of 10 years ago.

        "It's hard to fathom that there's a large audience out there for (Double X), particularly in today's market," said Toni Duboise, an analyst with ARS. "But, on the other hand, it could appeal to those kinds of buyers who look at Sony and Apple...and those people who are willing to spend more on a stylized version of a PC."

  • These guys Falcon Northwest [faclon-nw.com] have been doing this for a long time ...

  • build your own (Score:5, Insightful)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) <asv@@@ivoss...com> on Sunday September 29, 2002 @09:22AM (#4353336) Homepage Journal
    The systems they will be offering for 3-4 grand, could probably be built for less than $2,000. A high end system is where people can save the most money rolling their own. With all the online guides and books available for PC building, just about anyone can build a pc a in day, its really not that hard. I started building them five years ago, and now I'm building budget systems on the side for friends and relatives, padding the price by at least $200 and still beating Dell's prices on their low end systems, but not the ultra low end.
    • maybe you are right -- but you have to admit there IS such a market out there. they are probabbly trying to compete with the likes of alienware and falconNW -- and last i heard they were still selling systems. but what's questionable is that if their brand rocognition (plus tigerdirect's iffy-ness) will allow them to hit the jackpot to their intended market segment.
  • Isn't that a performance hit in the disk department?
    • Raid level 0 allows two disks to appear as one large disk effectively. Provided it is implemented in hardware a performance increase should be noticable, since for every 2bits written each drive only has to write one bit (and reading/writing a hdd is slow). (thats a slightly simplifed explination, and assumes there are only 2 disks in the array)
    • No, RAID0 is faster than a single drive. It can stripe the reads and writes to spread the I/O over each disk. The problem is that it provides no redundancy in case of a disk failure (you've lost everything at that point!).

      Another advantage is that it makes your two single drives of size N each look like a single drive of size N * 2. This was a big advantage back in the days of the all-common 9GB SCSI. If you had a 40GB movie file you were working with it was inconvenient (or impossible) to partition it up. Merging 5 x 9GB drives into one logical device was great, but with single-drive capacities reaching several hundred GB RAID0's single logical drive is not quie as useful.

      Provided it is done via hardware and not software, of course. :)
      • Er. The rule of thumb with RAID0 is that you not only add up the transfer rates, you also add the seek times.

        So depending on the type of access, RAID0 can be slower than a single drive. If you're primarily working with small files (e.g. Windows installation), the transfer rate may not outweigh the increased seek time.

        YMMV of course. The only RAID I trust for boot volumes is RAID1 - RAID0 is fine for data, assuming you're working with large sequentially accessed files, and you back everything up on a constant basis. RAID 5 is probably a safer bet, with distributed parity and the ability to have live spares online and spinning to make up for any hardware failure.
        • Right, but I think the assumption (the one I made at least) is that most hard-core gamers would be working with few large-files, right? I am thinking of the FPS which traditionally have HUGE (several hundred MB to a GB!) .pak files with all the junk in it.

          I would think the large-file benefit would outweigh the many small-file hit. I used to recall that Adaptec Ez-CD Creator (when it was called that) would do benchmarks on small and large file disk I/O. The actuall performance of the system was somewhere in-between. I would suspect it would be the same with your typical gaming system. Faster than a single drive but not as fast as if you had all large files.

          I would never use RAID0 because as I stated a bad drive would hose the entire system. RAID1 is the way to go for low-budget RAID.

          RAID 5 (10/01 et al) requires too many disks to be a consumer-grade RAID solution, really.
          • Yes, and no. Jedi Knight 2 contains a few thousand files, only a few of which are extremely large. These few files are the levels (and movies), but I'm not sure how loading a level (into RAM) faster is worth the risk. I think VM ends up behaving like small files, because small chunks of data are written into and out of it all the time.

            RAID5 requires 3 disks. The problem is you write off 1 disk for parity (OK, parity is distributed across all disks, but a drive's worth of space), so the space advantage is virtually nil vs. a 2-drive RAID0 solution. You just pay for an extra disk and peace of mind. Of course, I haven't seen a hardware RAID5 IDE controller, so...

            To be honest I haven't farted around with RAID0 since 4GB drives were the largest you could get your hands on. I think a current-tech 3-drive RAID0 array would have a faster seek than one of those drives. So it's possible that the seeks are so quick these days that even after adding a few it's still fast enough.

            I think the only RAIDs in major use these days are 1 & 5, and variations on the theme ("RAID 50" scares me). RAID0 isn't really used except for temporary circumstances.

            BTW, I had a drive fail in a RAID0 array. Back up early, back up often. I only lost a few hours of work. I can't imagine what would happen to someone who didn't have a tape drive.
      • Thanks for the clarification. Brain hadn't had any coffee yet. Hopefully, it will be done with hardware.
  • People buying computers like this for so much money are helping are starving industry and help to get over this stupid recession !
    If you are a patriot american you should buy one, if you are non-american you should buy one nevertheless.
    A strong economy is good for everyone and makes much jobs and very much wealth.
  • As the article states, they're entering the market niche already occupied by Alienware and Falcon Northwest. While I wish them the best of luck, I can't help but wonder if there's enough business to go around.

    After all, gamers (those who play more than solitaire on the computer) are a subset of computer users. Gamers who need great performance (fps++) are a subset of that group (since many of the most popular games don't need ninja machines).

    Of that group, Gamers who can't already build their own ninja machine are a further subset. And, there again, you're looking at a further subset who want a machine tricked out with lights and suchlike.

    So basically you're marketing to Gamers who aren't technically saavy enough to build their own computer, but who play the most resource-intensive games, have a lot of money to buy these computers and also want lights and transparent panels, etc....

    They're also targeting "high-performance enthusiasts", but I think, really, that this is even a smaller group. Most people who are really into high-performance can, and already do, build their own computers. Most, not all, but most. In my opinion.

    Then there's the whole RAID 0 thing. RAID 0 stripes data across the 2 drives, and is very useful for tasks that require the movement of large amounts of data quickly, like video editing. In my opinion, no game gets any useful benefit whatsoever from RAID 0. Sure, on map change your Counter-Strike level may load a half a second faster than anyone else, but my Western Digital Special Edition (with the 8Mb cache) loads them within a couple of seconds, so I don't see what's to be gained here. A red herring, if you will.

    Why? Because there's a major drawback to RAID 0. If one of the drives fail, the data is lost for both, since it's "striped" across both, with no parity bit to tell the array how to rebuild the lost data. Double your risk for a speed gain you're unlikely to see unless you do lots of video editing.

    I hope their support line is ready for angry calls....

    Still, it's a neat rig. But, it's a niche market. Very niche.

  • Uhhh (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 0xA ( 71424 ) on Sunday September 29, 2002 @09:41AM (#4353383)
    Overclock the CPU and setup a raid 0 so you basically halve the mtbf on the logical volume?

    What's the warranty, 12 minutes?

  • ...What's with all of the C-Net and Infoworld stories showing up 2-3 days later on /.? It's not news if a major news outlet has had it on their front page for *days*.

    -b
  • Why would you pay 3-4 grand for a dubious quality system from TG?

    It is so easy to get a custom built system with better components at a decent price.

    I personally don't believe overclocking is worth the hassle, risk, or expense. Your super duper unstable overclocked box will probably be obsoleted by a normal system in a month.

    Here's how to buy a computer: pick a reasonable price/performance point. Don't get screwed out of your money for that last 3% of performance. Keep the difference and replace your computer sooner than you could have if you'd wasted your money on the overpriced top end.

    -Kevin

  • "This machine is so powerful we needed to plumb in water to cool it," used to impress visitors to the lab.

    Times change.

    There used to be this game called chess that required little more than a candle and a keen mind.

  • Quake III and WC III run fine on computers with a single processor, non SCSI non RAID hard drives, moderate amounts of RAM, and a decent video card. There simply are no games out there to justify spending so much, and by time a game does in fact appear, the cost of the advertised system will have dropped tremendously.
    • Battlefield and UT2k3 don't even come close, either... A $600 comp will easily run those at 90fps+

      Doom3 will not run like that on anything today, btw.

      And as it's been said before, the whole system could be built for about under $1400 at newegg [newegg.com], and if you went down to your local PC shop for someone to put it together, it would probably cost $100 at the most.

      If you spent $3000 on a PC, just max it out with top-of-the-line products, then buy an entire TERABYTE, or more, of hd space. Believe me, it can be used easily with broadband if you're a power downloader/ripper.

      Besides, overclocking sucks -- it's like driving 80MPH in a 75MPH zone speed-wise, except it gets you in a lot of more trouble. Unless you have one of those 300A/1.5As that magically double themselves, of course...
    • Have you played Morrowind? I've Got an Athlon 1800 w/ gygabyte 333 board, 512 MB ram, Gforce 4 ti 4600, and my frame rates are barely adequate. I'm talking 20 frames sec in outdoor scenes with lots of detail.

      Game seems to be mostly CPU limited, and I think poor programming decisions are to blame for the bad frame rates. But it is an awsome game, but It would be so much better with like consitant 60 Fps.
  • Read what others have to say about their experiences with Tiger Direct before you place any orders: Consumer Affairs [consumeraffairs.com]
    • Every company will have some complaints levied against it. Especially one that does a lot of business. Granted I am but one voice, but I've ordered a number of items from TigerDirect over the years and never had any troubles with them. I've never ordered anything as large as a PC from them, however.
      • You're right. But since they made it to the Rogue's Gallery of consumeraffairs.com, I think that the complaints about them must have trespassed some acceptable limit.
  • I'm perceiving my modest 1GHz Athlon desktop as sounding like a vacuum cleaner. I dare not envision how the monsters in the article would sound. Who would like to shell out $4K for a machine sounding like a jet engine warming up? Do these gamers live far into the woods, where they can crank up their 900 watt speakers in order to hear anything in a game like Thief (where the audio clues is most important)? Or did they accomplish the same thrashing of their eardrums by using head phones on maximum volume? How else can they stand the noise?

    What fun is a "super gaming rig" if you can only stand sitting near it for 15 minutes?

    Personally, I'd rather pay a premium for a quiet machine. I'd pay as much as 50% extra to get a silent desktop. Until some progress is done on the noise arena, I'm sticking to my silent IBM laptops. For me gaming on a PC is dead and will be until the manufacturers start taking this problem seriously.

    • The computer featured in the article is water cooled.
    • Read the article, that is why they have water cooling. The major problem with most of their competition is that you are 100% right. Sure you may have a gazillion frames to make the farm mission in Mafia really smooth but where is that damn 747 taking off? Can't help but feel it spoils that 30's atmosphere.

      As for gaming being dead to you, I am sure the hardware manufacturers give a damn. Gaming is not yet seen as their major customer. Despite the fact that only games require the latest and fastest in hardware.

      • True, I did not read the article. I've read about 50 of them in the last year and was assuming (wrongly in this case) that this one stated what the other 50 had. My mistake.
        Regarding your observation of the fact that games are driving the industry. I second that, but there is also one other thing. Java development.Not long ago, I had to purchase one of IBM's most powerful laptops available, just to meet the minimum req. of 1 Gig memory and 1 GHz processor for J2EE development. This machine will have a life span of 6 months before it'll be sent for destruction. Running huge frameworks on top of application servers eats memory and CPU like nothing besides games and 3D/ video processing. I'd estimate most consumers of powerful workstations are gamers. In second place Java developers and then far behind 3D and video specialists. These few are the only suckers which HAVE TO upgrade all the time.

        Quite frankly I'm starting to get fed up with the argument "But hardware is cheep".
  • What is the point of raid 0? All it does is square the probability of your new extra-big drive failing.
    • Indeed. If I had two hard drives and a RAID controller, I'd rather mirror them than stripe..
      • My exact sentiments when I started my job at the place I work now. Less then a week since I'd gotten there and one of the computers with critical data (running a striped configuration noless) kicked the bucket. One drive, good, one drive bad. Try sending a raid 0 pair to data recovery sometime. You're lucky if you get them back with a post-it note that says "ha ha, good one!". Considering the distrubing number of IDE hard drives I've seen fall over dead in the last year, I would only do a mirror or raid 5 (which needs at least 3 drives and is more complicated to set up).
    • The point is twice the hard drive performance. Of course failure is a concern (doubling the failure rate), but given the high reliability of modern hard drives and the ability to backup actually important data (i.e. not applications) on a CD-R, it seems viable.
    • ehm, how exactly does it make you drive more like to fail?

      Raid 0 is striping. Wich means it spreads the data over the disks. This makes for faster writing and reading. Granted if one of the disks fail then you have lost all the data. Because now two disks contain all of youre data the risk of loosing youre data increases. Not the risk of the drive itself failing.

      So the point is extra speed, handy for games, at a slightly increased risk of losing data, not a big deal for games.

      It is called a trade off. You might not like the trade others do. vi VS emacs wars are pointless.

  • Ok, we've all establised these systems are overpriced for what they offer. And that the only people who would be interested, are people who want watercooling, and a clear side.

    Does anyone see the problem here?

    The case is designed for LAN parties, etc, as is the spec.

    But anyone who goes to LAN parties, or anything like them, generally knows a bit about computers, enough to avoid this computer.

    so why would anyone buy one, unless they had enough money (so we can rule out a lot of people) who thought they were keen enough to validate this spend, but don't know what they are buying?

    • Every hobbyist industry has the silver spooners that want to be a part of the group, but doesn't want to "waste" the time or effort. I suspect that the people who would buy a "riced out" computer of that sort is largely of that type.
  • In a year, it'll be a thousand.

    In two years, it'll be two hundred.

    In three years, you can trade it for a chokolate bar if you want to drag the thing home.



    It's the curse of Moore (or blessing, if you didn't buy it right away).
    .

  • I see this as fundamentally flawed.

    Most of the same enthusiasts that this is aimed towards, especially those needing/desiring watercooling, are going to do it themselves. They could build this system for $1500.

    Not to mention the fact that they would do it anyways just out of the sheer enjoyment of tinkering with their machines.

    Plus, they get to pick exactly what parts they want, not whatever the company decides to put in there.

    There is the issue of a warantee, being able to send it back if it blows up... But is this worth the extra $1500-$2000? Absolutely not. You could build an entirely new system for that price.
    • Just rooted thru the Sept. ComputerUser ads (mostly from local clone shops) -- comparable systems are advertised therein starting at about $1100. For $2200 in clone dollars, you can get a dual-processor honkin' server-class machine with every bell and whistle.

      And it's nowhere near as likely to be DOA as anything from TigerDirect.

    • "Not to mention the fact that they would do it anyways just out of the sheer enjoyment of tinkering with their machines."

      I know quite a few gamers that like high performance machines, but never want to open a box. I know, I'm the sucker that has to build them.
  • If someone brought that thing to a LAN party, trying to show it off, and said they spent $4000 on it, they would be LAUGHED OUT of the LAN party!
  • I am one of those gamers that spends about that amount of money on the latest hardware. Yes, 3-4 thousand dollars to build a computer for gaming. I do that about twice a year. It's a hobby, both the gaming and the box-building. I do have other hobbies (and work) so at some point I might be tempted to 'upgrade' the easy way and just shell out the $$ instead of building it myself. Most of the 'work' in building these machines by far is the research. Having a company claim to have done the research to build a gaming system sounds like an interesting attempt at the least.

    I can asure you that $3000 is easily spend on:
    - Intel 2.8GHz at roughly $550
    - Latest graphics card, currently the ATI 9700 family for about $400
    - NEC 21" monitor for $800 (I actually bought a Sony 24" for $2000...Not a good buy)
    - 2*512 DDR PC-2700 from Crucial for $360
    - Adaptec ATA RAID for $390
    - 2*100Gb IBM HD for $240
    - Motherboard, sound, mouse, other perifirals $500

    we are at $3240 without any games to play

    yeah, these choices are not the cheapest solutions. You can save about 50% of the price giving in only about 10% performance. I'm just telling you there is a (small) market for these systems.

    Anyway, back to CounterStrike at 1 BILLION frames per second ;-)

  • $3000 PC vs $200 Console (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rlp ( 11898 ) on Sunday September 29, 2002 @01:03PM (#4354085)
    Why would anyone pay three thousand dollars for a PC to play games?? Earlier this week - Slashdot ran a thread about PCs Losing Out as a Gaming Platform? [slashdot.org]. Game companies are developing for consoles first. PC games typically involve an hour or more (if you're lucky) of patch / configuration hell vs. load and go with console games. Soon most consoles will support broadband and multiplayer games. They might be able to sell a $3000 box to a business for CAD applications, but as a gaming box; high end PC's are dead.
    • Why would anyone pay three thousand dollars for a PC to play games?? Earlier this week - Slashdot ran a thread about PCs Losing Out as a Gaming Platform?. Game companies are developing for consoles first. PC games typically involve an hour or more (if you're lucky) of patch / configuration hell vs. load and go with console games. Soon most consoles will support broadband and multiplayer games. They might be able to sell a $3000 box to a business for CAD applications, but as a gaming box; high end PC's are dead.
      I don't have moderator points today; if I did, I would mark this a troll. You can't compare a $3000 PC to a $200 console on price because they're entirely different things; the hardware in a console is several generations behind the hardware in the PC, and PCs do many (non-game) things that consoles don't. As for your claim that PC gaming is losing out to console gaming, well, people have been saying that for at least five years and it's never been true. And any game that involves "an hour or more (if you're lucky) of patch / configuration hell" is defective. Spend ten minutes while the auto-updater runs, set up your controls (or just use the defaults), and go.

      That consoles will "soon" support broadband and multiplayer is irrelevant, firstly because it has been "soon" for some time now and has never really materialized, and second because consoles lack keyboards, and therefore automatically lose the very important social aspect of online gaming.

      The only justification I can see for a serious gamer NOT having a high-end PC is that middle-end PCs run current games well enough. Howver, this will cease to be the case when ID releases the next Doom, and serious gamers use up the performance cranking detail settings anyways.

      IHBT. IHL. HAND.
      • OK Jimmy B - let me address the points you made:

        1) Can't compare consoles vs. $3000 PC's because PC hardware is more advanced and PC's are multi-purpose. Well, of course you're right on both counts. However, I'm comparing a console with a $3000 PC being marketed as a high-end game machine. Sure, it might be great as a Web server, super as a file-server, build engine, etc. but the company building it is targeting it specifically for gamers. So, sure it can be used for other things, but that's not the way the manufacturer is positioning the product.

        2) Any game that involves an hour or more of patching / configuration is defective. Again, I agree with you. However, it's been my experience that in the rush to get products to market, game companies frequently ship defective products. When testing PC games, game companies have to deal with a combinatoric explosion of different hardware and software configurations, with consoles - few (frequently one). Furthermore, with PC games, companies can get sloppy - knowing that gamers can always be expected to download the patch(es). With console games - they need to get it right the first time.

        3) Broadband for games has been coming "real-soon-now" for a long time. Without keyboards, players miss the social aspects of the games. Console makers have announced broadband and multi-player services which are coming "real-soon-now". I believe them - from the perspective of a console maker, they promise increased demand for their consoles and games, but most importantly, promise an on-going stream of revenue (subscriptions) for the company. Consoles are sold at a loss, games make money but are a one-shot deal. Subscription fees for multi-player gaming are virtually pure profit once the servers are in place. I trust that Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo will follow through on broadband - as it's in their own self-interest. As for a keyboard, there's no reason that the console makers could not add a keyboard or even a microphone (VoIP) to existing consoles.

        Please don't get me wrong - I'd love to own a high end PC with lots of processing power, memory, and RAID disks. It would be a great development box. Just a little hard to justify as a game mahine.
        • I'm comparing a console with a $3000 PC being marketed as a high-end game machine.
          That doesn't mean that people buying it will use it exclusively to play games. You're counting the full $3000 price, when you should be counting the difference between that price and a mid-range computer.
          Again, I agree with you. However, it's been my experience that in the rush to get products to market, game companies frequently ship defective products.
          As a frequent dabbler in beta, demo, freeware and otherwise expected-to-be-bad software, I have to say that my experience is quite to the contrary. Back in the dark DOS when games had to interface directly with the hardware this was certainly true, but today they only deal with abstraction layers. It is true that companies can be somewhat sloppy because of patches, but (a) this is going to happen with any multiplayer console games, for the same reason, and (b) this allows for faster releases and thus a time advantage in games over consoles.
          Subscription fees for multi-player gaming are virtually pure profit once the servers are in place.
          As opposed to multiplayer PC games, which are (with the exception of MMORPGS) never subscription. This eats up more of the price difference you were arguing in point (1). As for the keyboard, there certainly is a reason why console makers won't add one: they don't want to turn their consoles into general-purpose PCs, and most people don't have furniture setups suitable for keyboards around their consoles.
  • Wait, wasn't that the HOT Rod and Hot Wheels PC offered with the Barbie PC [com.com]?
  • I cringed when I saw the name TigerDirect. They're the ones who make crappy advertisements on PCWorld [pcworld.com] magazine.

    AlienWare [alienware.com] does a similar thing, but I've heard much better things about them than this Systemax company - they've been tagged the Cadillac of computers.

    Not to mention, a high-end machine costs, at most, around/less than $3000.
  • ...a window in the case.

    I have a feeling this is not aimed at the /. crowd. How many geeks would put a neon light inside a overclocking box so hot it needs water cooling?

    To paraphrase Robin Williams: "Double XX boxen are God's way of telling you you have too much money." The target market is the same as the average Wall Street cocaine dealer: Guys who want to impress their friends with their electronics purchases (but limited to those with gullible friends).

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