Wahoo P4 Stratagem System Review

Ian Bell writes "Buddhacon reviews the P4 stratagem system from Wahoo Computers. Could this be the most powerful home system on the market? With just about every option available including an overclocked Intel 2.9GHz CPU, Radeon 9700PRO, 1GB of memory and all the cooling features you can think of you would think a system like this would blow the competition away. Just goes to show that sometimes a fine tuned V6 can beat an over the top V8."

I'm sorry, but WTF would you ever need this for?

[jonman_d]

Christ people, this is starting to sicken me. I've got an iMac 333 G3, a couple P2 333 and an old P1 90. Unless you're doing something like heavy graphics editing, what the hell would you ever need something this powerful for? And over over six grand?

People, stop trying to build the fastest box imaginable, and thing serious. Use what you need for the job. Save money. Reuse old machines. Don't spend six grand on something you'll never need (well, you will, but probably when it costs more like a thousand bucks). If you can justify having this much power, okay, but otherwise, stop wasting time and money, and killing perfectly usable old boxen.

Re:I'm sorry, but WTF would you ever need this for

[Anonymous Coward]

regardless, you can build the same system with dual pentiums and 2 gigs of ram for less...

Overpriced systems are newsworthy?

[Unoriginal Nick]

Who, in their right mind, would buy one of these for $6536? You could easily build a faster system for 1/3 the price. It seems like a company that just doesn't know how to build computers. It comes with water cooling, but could only be overclock to 2.9GHz before it started becoming unstable. What? Why does it have a Zip drive if it comes with a CD and DVD burner? Why RAID-0 WD1200JB hard drives, and not a Cheetah 15k.3 for a boot drive? And most importantly, they don't seem to know how to ship a computer:
"Due to inadequate mounting procedures, the Radeon 9700's core was ripped from the card during shipping."

Multiple CPUs?

[tgrotvedt]

For that price, you could build a dual CPU box with 2 PIII class chips. You could match the RAM, video/sound cards, HDD etc. A system that could do almost everything this one can could have been built 12 months ago.

Before people say that this is different because it's a desktop (unmodified), do I need to point out that the average user won't need this much power? The people that buy this will be rich techies, or businesses. Alot of techies prefer dual CPU stuff for the value, so this has no real market. Too new, too expensive.

I'm confused

[Andorion]

"Most powerful home system"? 3.06GHz P4s are available, I don't understand why this system has a 2.8 overclocked to 2.9?

-Berj

Re:I'm sorry, but WTF would you ever need this for

[NeoEinstein]

I pretty agree with you but, where do you find old boxes ? The whole computer market is overclocked overheated and overmoneyed ! I got my AMD 550MHz since three years now, and wouldn't give it away, but even that is too much for the use I have : wife's reading and sending mail, sister surfing on the Internet, myself got not enough time to really appreciat the power. But now there are 2GHz and more, cool yeah, but does it really enhance working speed ?? It allows you to faster kill in Quake3 (or alike), but that's pretty all it does !

Re:NOT WORTH IT

[darkov]

The problem is that the people with enough money to buy this sort of stuff most often have the least knowledge or time to put one together. And the time factor is substatial. When it starts flaking out on you intermitently you can't just dump it on the vendor. You have to pull out or replace each bit until you find out whats going on. Ror your average nerd this is no problem since they have lots of time on their hands -pesky things like girlfriends or lives don't sap their tinker time, but for most people they have better things to do.

So yes, you're right, but there is obviously a market for this sort of stuff.

I don't get it

[0x0d0a]

Why are people remotely excited about this?

I figured that some poster had managed to sucker the editors into putting an ad up, but apparently people are really into this.

Can anyone tell me why people *care* about this? There's nothing particularly significant about this computer. It's not on the level of people introducing case windows for the first time, nor is it a never-before-done hardware hack. Some guy tossed a bunch of stuff that's already been done into a case, and is selling it for a *lot* of money. Big whoop.

This doesn't have unparalleled performance, since Sun sells systems that can smoke this thing.

It doesn't let home users do anything they couldn't do before, since no software requires this, and in two years it's going to be a middling system.

It's just another currently high-end x86 system. You can get things like this from a *ton* of vendors, with overclocking even.

Re:I'm sorry, but WTF would you ever need this for

[Stanley Feinbaum]

Most people don't need a Porsche either, but I sure as hell enjoy mine.

Consider this a "luxery PC" and the market for these items is generally small, but profitable.

Re:Who is the market for these sorts of computers?

[ConsistentChaos]

". . . but you can't build a computer company on the whims of 14 year-old boys (can you?!?)."

One word -- Nintendo.

Stop the car analogies already

[Alan Partridge]

why do we always get this idiotic V6, V8 and turbo crap? A V6 of x displacement will be broadly equivalent in power and torque output to a V8 of the same displacement - the car engine/CPU analogy NEVER FUCKING WORKS.

So stop it.

A custom case is not news.

[Insanity]

It doesn't matter if this computer is a good deal or a bad one, if the components are well chosen or not, if the construction quality is amazing or if the whole thing just looks cheesy, the real question is this: how is this news?

Someone throws standard retail components into a custom-designed case, sells it for way more than it's worth, and somehow we care?

Computers are not cars, there is no art to tweaking them at the hardware level. Put prefabricated components together in the right way, and you have a computer. There are many hardware sites dedicated to this; let this kind of article be posted there.

This whole case-modding culture is a joke if you think about it. It's the computer equivalent of bored rich kids paying someone to put the world's largest spoiler on a civic.

Obsolete already

[Danborg]

It just cracks me up that this overpriced machine is already behind the technology curve. The motherboard they chose does not support the new 8x AGP standard, so for that reason they are not getting full use of their Radeon 9700 card. (It will sync to 4x AGP.)

And too bad they didn't choose the 3.06 Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading -- yet another new feature this machine of yesterday does not support.

And what about Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives? A year from now, when pretty much every drive sold is SATA, the owner of this dinosaur will be sorry they didn't have the foresight to include support for this technology.

Several other posters seem enamored with the DVD+RW drive that is included, but a better choice would be the new Sony drive that supports DVD+RW, DVD+R as well as DVD-RW and DVD-R. (Yes, those dashes and plus signs mean different things folks!)

I could build a more modern machine that supports all of the important technologies listed above for half the price, without all the punk-ass neon light shit.

Its like show horses

[Zerelli]

The people who do not understand why this system is so expensive have not had experience selling to people with lots of money. That sounds a little strange so let me give you an example (a strange one but it works). A few years back I used to raise and show rabbits (pedigreed fancy rabbits, look up the American Netherland Dwarf Rabbit Club or American Rabbit Breeders Association for more info). We would occasionally sell stock at some of the shows. One of the places we sold lots of rabbits was the State Fair. While watching the crowd go buy and talking to people interested in buying, I ran across some horse people (there was a very large Quarter Horse show at this fair). I had some pet quality stock there that I would have sold at a flea market for $10 to $20. For the fair the price was slightly higher, say $20 to $30. The horse people remarked that my rabbits were a lot cheaper than the guy whom they had just spoken to. I explained that we do not try to make money off of stock just to cover feed costs, I also pointed out that the stock I had was from more prestigious blood lines. They bought the most expensive and lower quality animals. Their reason? They said they didn't want a cheap rabbit, they wanted and expensive one. The price tag is a prestige item more than what they are buying. That is why this company will make money. People with money don't really care $6k to someone willing to pay $6k for a computer is peanuts.

Re:I'm sorry, but WTF would you ever need this for

[volve]

And then the money you made on the last 30 systems you built, gets given to a charity... which is a wonderful idea, but 1x XP2400 with the specs you mentioned is the equivalent in cost to about 6x Celerons... now which do you think would be more useful to said charity?

Personally, unless you have a grand plan along the lines of giving that charity 5x more PCs or something, you're wasting money, despite whether you can technically 'afford it', I hate to think of all the handicapped children vying to use 1 PC...

-VolVE