It's not the ultimate gaming rig, and it's not the ultimate workstation rig. It's decent parts from each side, but fails to reach the potential of either route.
For games, drop it to a 4800+ on phase and overclock the stuffing out of it. Drop 3 of the SATA drives and convert them to 3-15K rpm scsi drives. Toss in a nice SCSI controller. I would say 2GBs of memory, leaving you at 1T and room to grow.
For a workstation, drop the 7800s, and put in real opengl cards. Same thing with the harddrives. Then it would look about right.
Also does XP 32-bit support NUMA?
For games, drop it to a 4800+ on phase and overclock the stuffing out of it. Drop 3 of the SATA drives and convert them to 3-15K rpm scsi drives. Toss in a nice SCSI controller. I would say 2GBs of memory, leaving you at 1T and room to grow.
For a workstation, drop the 7800s, and put in real opengl cards. Same thing with the harddrives. Then it would look about right.
Also does XP 32-bit support NUMA?
I think the Dream Machine isnt bad but I would have done a few things differently. I would have done Raptors in a raid setup for Windows and then another set or two of Raptors running raid for storage and video work. Im not a fan of Scuzzy so I wouldnt have bothered with that. As far as the CPU choice I think in the real world of everyday "Joe computer enthusiast" a dual core A64 overclocked to 3+ Ghz would walk all over those Opt's in many cases and would make a whole lot more sense for a gamer (which is most of the "Joe computer enthusiast" types). I cant fault anything else in the rig really....I thought it wasnt bad for magazine writers who probably are not hard core overclockers anyway...
AFAIK, every 7800GTX has dual-link DVI and a single-link DVI port. And there are reports of SLI success with 2x 7800GTX. (from Apple's display forum).
Even the 6800GTO had dual-link DVI. HardForum's got a big thread on 30" Apple with posts from people with the actual monitor.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1028074751#post1028074751
squirrel dog
Diamond Member
- Oct 10, 1999
- 5,564
- 48
- 91
I think the rag max pc is a whore to the highest bidder . For the un informed that would be to the co. that spends the most ad dollars in that sad little rag .
thats pretty crappy, IMHO. 4 CPUs? 'cause XP is going to support that...no SCSI? No Phase change or pelitiers? That keyboard is crappy, they don't have a wheel, joystick or gamepad on there, and I'd take the Giga works s750 over the z-5500. 8GB of ram is hardcore overkill. so, basically, meh.
Mrvile
Lifer
- Oct 16, 2004
- 14,066
- 1
- 0
Exactly what I was thinking. Monarch's setup ran circles around it because Monarch built smart, and built a real GAMING computer. FX-57, dual 7800GTX, only 2GB ram (although they used 4x 512 dimms which is odd), a couple Raptors and they had a 4000 dollar rig that pretty much outscored MaximumPC's rig in all their tests. The best part is that both rigs are in one issue
I loved how the Monarch rig beat the $12,000 dream machine and still cost less than $5,000. Then, MaxPC dinged it a point and gave it a 9/10 for being "expensive." WTF?
All this whining about not having SCSI drives in the machine, but i don't see a problem with close to 2 terrabytes of HDD space, which is all in raid 3 BTW, so not only is it fast as hell (they say 170MB/s average HDD speed), it also has parity so they can have a drive fail and still have no problems.
Also, they didn't build this comp for 100% raw gaming only speed, but to be able to do loads of stuff at once, as was mentioned earlier in the thread. That and their benchmarks on multithread programs, which aren't standard benchmarks and so don't show up in the charts, showed huge performance increases over dual core P4 and X2 comps.
Also, they didn't build this comp for 100% raw gaming only speed, but to be able to do loads of stuff at once, as was mentioned earlier in the thread. That and their benchmarks on multithread programs, which aren't standard benchmarks and so don't show up in the charts, showed huge performance increases over dual core P4 and X2 comps.
Busy but, linky. Basically RAID 3 is garbage, which is why it isn't used. You become I/O bottlenecked at the parity drive. Every write operation requires the parity to be calculated and the actuator on the parity drive to service the write against each byte. Hardly the best way to go about writing parity. RAID 5 offers a distributed parity scheme that offers better write performance.
RAID 3
RAID 10
Though for the best performance on reads and writes, you *cannot* have a raid level that involves parity first off. The usual suspect for optimal performance at the expense of overall cost of implementation and usuable disk space would be RAID 10. Not the RAID 01 that is typically on onboard controllers of late.
You have to remember, they didn't buy this stuff, companies send them their products to put inside of it, they ask all the top manufacturers to send their very best stuff, and they do it, so, that is just the price of how much it WOULD cost if you or I were to build one....
Saint Nick
Lifer
- Jan 21, 2005
- 17,722
- 6
- 81
this computer looks absolutely stupid and IMPRACTICAL.
they just took the most expensive parts they could find and slapped it together.
they just took the most expensive parts they could find and slapped it together.
MaxPC are noobs. Their dream machines are ALWAYS nothing but the most expensive "mainstream" parts they can find. If Intel had a $2000 celeron with no cache, they'd use it.
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