The most powerful game machine you can buy will use the G-400 Max

[Mike H]

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/990820/ca_gamepc_1.html

The specs of the LiquidX-800E will include the Athlon processor thermally accelerated to 800MHz, a Microstar main board, Kryotech cooling system with case and a PC Power and Cooling 300-Watt Turbo Cool power supply. Other components are two 22GB IBM Deskstar hard drives connected using Promise Technologies FastTrak66 RAID Level 0 controller card for 44GB of high-throughput performance, 384MB of EMS's PC133 HSDRAM, a Matrox 32MB G400 MAX dual head (for multiple monitor output) video card and a Pioneer 103S slot loading DVD player.

The LiquidX-800S will include the same basic components except for an Adaptec SCSI RAID controller connected to two 18GB Quantum Atlas 10k Ultra160/m hard drives for 36GB of fast SCSI performance. Other differences include a Plextor 40x Ultrawide SCSI CD-ROM and a Pioneer 303S SCSI slot loading DVD player.

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Mike H.

Watercooled AMD K6-3 450 @ 500 (100*5) Epox EP-MVP3G Rev. 1.0 Bios 7-16-99 128 Meg PC100 Matrox Marvel G-200 TV 16MB 5.15 Drivers SB Live! Full Retail Western Digital Caviar AC313000RTL

[Joel]

Why not? The best for the best. Would really love to see some benchmarks from that monster.

Joel

[Ant]

I'll see if they'll send me one to review

[SteveC]

Did you ever doubt that they'd use a G400?! How dare you underestimate the power of the gee400!

[Jorden]

But what will the fps in Quake2 or Q3A be??

[the_tsi]

Too bad Raid 0 is worthless. Why bother sticking a raid card in there just to do 0? You don't even get any performance increase. While most of their other component decisions make sense, putting a fasttrak or an adaptec raid card in there doesn't help at all for most people. Even if you did 1 or 5, there's not going to be any advantage for gamers. It's not like we do multiple huge operations at a time.

Forget raid in this system, get a single 10K rpm drive with 4 megs of cache (cough IBM) or possibly one of the new Atlas IV's. Or even better, get a drive and overspin the motor in it; that's the real limitation in access speed.

Or forget drives entirely, stick a full gig of ram in there, make a 768M ramdrive, copy your game there, THEN play it. With any OS besides Windows, you could boot of a ramdrive and see some serious speed. I mean, who needs a swapfile with 384M of ram, unless you're doing ORDBMS for an international corporation?

The Kryotech guys are great, and this is just another system of theirs that will kick ass; they just need to think more about their target audience than just getting something that has the fastest this, that and the other.

-Chris

[Scytale]

Hmm I never found SCSI RAID0 striping to be worthless. It used to give me an average 40% improvement over a single disk, not too shabby I think.
If you think that's not worth it then you probably wouldn't consider buying one of those LiquidX rigs anyway: 'Value for money' is not the issue here.

RAID1-5 would certainly not make sense unless you want to secure your Q2 save files for life...

[LAMFDTK]

Kryotech the monster truck of computers

[paulcs]

Has anyone seen one of these machines? I'm curious about how upgradable they are. 800 MHz processors (at spec) appear to be just around the corner. And, depending on the yields AMD gets, it may be possible to run an Athlon 700 MHz at 800 MHz without buying a computer/refrigerator hybrid.

However, if the machine allows you to always remain 150-200 MHz ahead, it may be worth it.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Jorden]

Paulcs: if you mean a RAID, "we have received the RAID controller board for the new Sun 450, and have set up about 150 GB of disks as a RAID-5 array. This will be used for the science part of the database."

Took that from the SETI@Home Technical news... http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/tech_news.html

So if you're in to the SETI Matrox Users Program, at least your PC has seen it closeby alot of times

Jorden.

[This message has been edited by Jorden (edited 08-25-1999).]

[paulcs]

Thanks Jorden, but I was thinking more about the front side bus and the motherboard itself. Will you eventually be able to stick a faster Athlon or a motherboard upgrade in it without a degree in refrigeration engineering? Does it use a propriety motherboard which cannot be upgraded?

I'm just curious. It's an expensive machine, processors are getting faster all the time, we're bound to see improvements in the Athlon motherboard shortly, and I've had some bad experiences with systems that couldn't be upgraded.

On the other hand, we all know how well the G400 responds to processor upgrades. It makes me tremble a bit thinking about the Max on an 800 MHz (or higher) system.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[the_tsi]

The fact that faster processors help performance so much on the MAX isn't necessarily a "good" thing. Although it does attest to the video card not being the bottleneck in a system, it usually means (as I'm almost certain it does in G400's case) that the drivers aren't very well optimized, and too much stuff is being done in software (or too much time is spent in software loops) instead of delivering things to the hardware.

So, while being able to upgrade a processor and get performance increase is nice, *hopefully* there will be across-the-board increases as the drivers mature.

-Chris

[This message has been edited by the_tsi (edited 08-25-1999).]