iBUYPOWER: 4.0GHz QX9650 and 3-way SLI 8800 Ultras
by Matt Campbell on April 10, 2008 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Interior
Here are some shots of the interior.
This truly is a mammoth case. You can see there are even more case fans on the bottom beneath the video cards. The final tally is eleven: Four in the side panel, one in the front, two in the back, two on top, and two on the bottom. All are 120mm, and seven (side, front and back) are lit with blue LEDs. Despite the difficulty of routing that many power connectors, iBUYPOWER does an adequate job of keeping things neat with cable ties and lots of daisy chaining. Power to the video cards is reasonably neat as well.
Setup and Startup
First, let's look at the BIOS.
It's clear that iBUYPOWER put some thought into tweak the system. The CPU and memory voltages are higher than stock and the memory timings have been adjusted. The result is an overclocked 4.0GHz setup out of the box.
So what are we greeted with at first boot?
Gah! The desktop is relatively clear of icons, but 50 processes running at "clean" startup is very high. (For reference, a more typical starting point for Windows Vista is 30 to 35 running processes when running only the typical graphics and sound drivers.) It's counterproductive to tweak system hardware for maximum performance and then put forth no effort when it comes to trimming down the operating environment. This, by the way, is without an anti-virus suite, which did not come installed on the system.
The video card drivers were up-to-date at the time of shipping (169.25), and we installed updated 169.28 drivers before beginning our testing for this review. As the EVGA motherboard is nForce-based, we can see a wealth of information in the Control Panel.
Now let's move on to actual performance.
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m2super - Thursday, April 10, 2008 - link
I bet if you pull 2gb of ram from the system with all the cards in you wont get this error message!Do a google search of this annoying issue quite a few people with vista 64, 4gb of ram and an sli config. The fact nvidia/ms havent done anything to resolve it is bs imo.
kuraegomon - Thursday, April 10, 2008 - link
I run SLI-ed GTX's, with RAID and overclocked Q6600. The only reason for a setup like this is to game at 1920x1200 or above. I have a 30' monitor, and like to game at 2560x1600 whenever possible. I believe that triple-SLI only makes sense with 2560x1600 resolutions, and you'll need the extra GPU-to-GPU bandwidth/lower latency that the 790i will provide, to really examine this. Sorry to say for anyone who bought one, but the 780i is already obsolete. (Of course, my 680i Striker Extreme is even moreso).Matt Campbell - Thursday, April 10, 2008 - link
Higher resolutions are in the queue for our next high end rig.Maffer - Thursday, April 10, 2008 - link
You just run into very annoying problem which has been with 780i quite quite a long time now. Please see this thread:http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=256404&mpa...">http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=256404&mpa...
You can find lots of people with the same problems right there. Nvidia is doing nothing to solve this crap. Some folks have switched to 790i system and problems vanished. This cannot be the solution though. Please Anandtech, if you have any powers to do something about this...at least poke nVidia around with a large trout or something :/
67STANG - Thursday, April 10, 2008 - link
I think people that build these "uber" machines forget their target audience: "the enthusiast". What enthusiast buys a machine like this rather than building it themself?I don't know about anyone else, but part of the fun of a high end computer is building it (at least for me). I wouldn't want to spend $5k+ on a system that I probably could have built myself for much less...
Granted it gets very high scores on benchmarks, but it would be hard not to with what is in it... I believe something could be built that could beat this for hundreds less. Pass.
abhaxus - Sunday, April 13, 2008 - link
There are most definitely people out there that buy the fastest computer available but have no clue how they are built.To use a car analogy... you are arguing that everyone who buys an Impreza WRX is stupid because you could buy the RS and put a turbo on it and go just as fast. The WRX is pre-tuned, has a warranty, and has a badge that says it's fast. These are the same people that buy a Dell XPS or Alienware rig.
To a semi-knowledgeable but not guru-level person, saying "i have an alienware pc" is a lot easier than "I have an overclocked 3.2ghz quad core pc with 2 8800GTS's in SLI"
Noya - Thursday, April 10, 2008 - link
Exactly...you don't buy a review article on a hardware tech site.HOOfan 1 - Thursday, April 10, 2008 - link
If these are the problems that are going to crop up and you will have to troubleshoot them yourself (which seems the case from reading the reviews on resellerrating.com) then you may as well just build it yourself and save even more money.