Expensive desktop provides knock-your-socks-off performance and lots of rear-port connectivity.
Polywell certainly named this power desktop computer correctly. Its 3.2-GHz Core 2 X9770 CPU is Intel's current state-of-the-art Extreme (overclockable) chip, which means that this is an extremely fast desktop. At $4799 (as of August 8, 2008), it's also extremely expensive. Then again, no one ever said state-of-the-art would be cheap; the X9770 CPU alone costs nearly $1500; the equally fresh-from-the-mint MSI nVidia GeForce GTX280 graphics card, about $500; and the 4GB of DDR3 1600 memory goes for nearly as much. But the steep cash outlay that's called for buys you a knock-your-socks-off WorldBench 6 score of 141, as well as a gaming experience of 207 to 266 frames per second. Extremely fast indeed.
Polywell certainly named this power desktop computer correctly. Its 3.2-GHz Core 2 X9770 CPU is Intel's current state-of-the-art Extreme (overclockable) chip, which means that this is an extremely fast desktop. At $4799 (as of August 8, 2008), it's also extremely expensive. Then again, no one ever said state-of-the-art would be cheap; the X9770 CPU alone costs nearly $1500; the equally fresh-from-the-mint MSI nVidia GeForce GTX280 graphics card, about $500; and the 4GB of DDR3 1600 memory goes for nearly as much. But the steep cash outlay that's called for buys you a knock-your-socks-off WorldBench 6 score of 141, as well as a gaming experience of 207 to 266 frames per second. Extremely fast indeed.
Part of the X4800-Extreme's excellent performance is due to a hard-drive setup we're beginning to see often on the power chart--pairs of 10,000-rpm, 300GB Western Digital WD3000GLFS VelociRaptor hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration. Not only are these 2.5-inch models mounted on 3.5-inch adapter sleds (as Western Digital calls them), they're energy-efficient. The sleds function as giant heat sinks that work so well that the drives are nearly cool to the touch even when in heavy use.
The X4800-Extreme is built around an extremely capable Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 motherboard with the most comprehensive array of rear-panel connections that I've ever seen in a PC. Besides a whopping eight USB 2.0 ports, the machine has both normal and 4-pin (mini) FireWire ports, optical and coaxial S/PDIF audio-out, six analog audio (7.1), and two gigabit ethernet ports. It also has motherboard headers for a pair of 2-port eSATA rear-slot breakout panels.
The X4800-Extreme is built around an extremely capable Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 motherboard with the most comprehensive array of rear-panel connections that I've ever seen in a PC. Besides a whopping eight USB 2.0 ports, the machine has both normal and 4-pin (mini) FireWire ports, optical and coaxial S/PDIF audio-out, six analog audio (7.1), and two gigabit ethernet ports. It also has motherboard headers for a pair of 2-port eSATA rear-slot breakout panels.
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