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antoneagle
n00b
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2007
- Messages
- 15
This will be a good-news, bad-news, report. Much like HardOCPs reviews of Pugets systems, they get almost everything just right... but stumbled on one big thing.
Ok, so I went and picked this up last night. First off, the folks at PCC were very helpful when I stopped by. They were enthusiastic about showing my around my new PC, answering questions, etc... a good group with a good attitude.
My concerns about the benchmarks have been pretty much put to bed. As they describe it, they benchmark their systems in the shop under entirely "normal operating conditions". That is, they don't turn off any extra services, shut down any normally running backgroud processes (sp?) etc. Also, the maxed out scores I was seeing online were for water-cooled overclocked systems, and mine is running at entirely stock speeds (for now).
When I got home, I benchmarked my old PC for comparison. Its a P4 3.4 Ghz, with 1GB ram, two 74GB raptors in a RAID-0, good ASUS motherboard, nVidia 7800GS (I think). Its a good system, but obviously a couple years old. I have no trouble playing most games under reasonable graphics options on this old PC. Anyway, to make a long story short, my new Puget system is literally 3 to 5 times faster in 3D games than my old PC. NICE!
Ok, so now for the bad news. If you go back and look at my original post, you will see that I ordered a Killer K1 network card. They did a fine job of installing the card, but when I got home and fired it up, I came to realize that they never installed the drivers for it, or any other K1 software... Windows couldn't even see that it existed. I had to use the motherboard NIC port, go online, download the Killer drivers, instal them, and then proceed to fumble around for another hour trying to get it working. Not exactly what I had in mind when I dropped down almost $4000 for my boutique gaming rig. I was pretty irritated last night. I have cooled down now (now that its working, and oh so fast), but still, I would definitely mark this down as a miss.
All in all thought, my initial impression (aside from the network card) are very positive. Its a really solid build... the case is sweet (mirror finish)... it's so silent that I can't even really tell if its running or not... and it's very very fast. Also, they did a nice job giving me a clean windows install without any bloatware.
I will follow this up with some photos of the build (not sure if the case will photograph... it is really almost a perfect mirror) and will post my benchmark results.
Thanks to everyone that gave me feedback about the questions I had over the last couple weeks.
-Anton
Ok, so I went and picked this up last night. First off, the folks at PCC were very helpful when I stopped by. They were enthusiastic about showing my around my new PC, answering questions, etc... a good group with a good attitude.
My concerns about the benchmarks have been pretty much put to bed. As they describe it, they benchmark their systems in the shop under entirely "normal operating conditions". That is, they don't turn off any extra services, shut down any normally running backgroud processes (sp?) etc. Also, the maxed out scores I was seeing online were for water-cooled overclocked systems, and mine is running at entirely stock speeds (for now).
When I got home, I benchmarked my old PC for comparison. Its a P4 3.4 Ghz, with 1GB ram, two 74GB raptors in a RAID-0, good ASUS motherboard, nVidia 7800GS (I think). Its a good system, but obviously a couple years old. I have no trouble playing most games under reasonable graphics options on this old PC. Anyway, to make a long story short, my new Puget system is literally 3 to 5 times faster in 3D games than my old PC. NICE!
Ok, so now for the bad news. If you go back and look at my original post, you will see that I ordered a Killer K1 network card. They did a fine job of installing the card, but when I got home and fired it up, I came to realize that they never installed the drivers for it, or any other K1 software... Windows couldn't even see that it existed. I had to use the motherboard NIC port, go online, download the Killer drivers, instal them, and then proceed to fumble around for another hour trying to get it working. Not exactly what I had in mind when I dropped down almost $4000 for my boutique gaming rig. I was pretty irritated last night. I have cooled down now (now that its working, and oh so fast), but still, I would definitely mark this down as a miss.
All in all thought, my initial impression (aside from the network card) are very positive. Its a really solid build... the case is sweet (mirror finish)... it's so silent that I can't even really tell if its running or not... and it's very very fast. Also, they did a nice job giving me a clean windows install without any bloatware.
I will follow this up with some photos of the build (not sure if the case will photograph... it is really almost a perfect mirror) and will post my benchmark results.
Thanks to everyone that gave me feedback about the questions I had over the last couple weeks.
-Anton