Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out Ballistic Sentinel XK Email This Print This View My Personal Library Heavy Gear April 2010 • Vol.10 Issue 4 Page(s) 26 in print issue Add To My Personal Library Ballistic Sentinel XK Sentinel XK $2,268 (as tested) Ballistic www.ballisticgamingpc.com CPU Rating: 4.5 Specs: CPU: Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.6GHz; GPU: AMD ATI Radeon HD 5970; RAM: 6GB Mushkin Silverline DDR3-1600MHz; Motherboard: Evga x58 Micro Edition SLI; Storage: 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda; OS Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) Ballistic is a newcomer to the boutique PC realm, but it has strong roots as a contract manufacturer in the business market. In its initial press release, Ballistic said that its goal was to deliver “the quality and performance of a boutique builder while offering the most affordable gaming computers on the market.” On its Web site, the company even challenges that the price of a system will be barely over 5% of what it would cost to build it yourself. Ballistic also backs its PCs with three-year warranties. Here, we check out the Ballistic Sentinel XK. The Sentinel XK certainly looks the part of a serious gaming PC. At the top of our test model is the Aerocool Touch 2000 fan controller. It gives you fan speed control of two 120mm internal fans near the liquid-cooling radiator, the 120mm fan at the base of the case, and the 120mm rear fan. There are also two 230mm fans—one in front of the hard drive cage and one on the side—that feature blue LEDs, and in combination with the two blue cold-cathode lights, the interior was clearly illuminated. Other than the blue lights, the only other colors on the black-clad Cooler Master Storm Sniper were the color-coded front-panel inputs for eSATA, USB, and audio. Ballistic overclocked the Intel Core i7-920 up to 3.6GHz, and it ran stable during our benchmarking process and Prime 95 overnight run. At press time, Ballistic offered a free 20% or more CPU overclock (typically $90). The overclock on our test model was nearly a 40% speed increase. ATI’s dual-GPU Radeon 5970 was also overclocked, with around a 10% increase in core clock speed, and although we experienced an occasional lockup in Dirt 2, it was otherwise stable. Three 2GB sticks of Mushkin Silverline DDR3-1600MHz, a 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda, and an LG BD-ROM/16X DVD burner combo drive rounded out the system. The Sentinel XK performed well in our benchmarks, including the top fps rate (54.9) in Dirt 2 at 2,560 x 1,600. Its 3DMark Vantage score of 23216 (a 23187 GPU score and 23302 CPU score) was also impressive. The nearly 1GHz processor overclock let the Sentinel XK deliver Cinebench 10 (score of 21952), POV-Ray Beta (4889.20 pixels per second), and SiSoftware Sandra 2010 Lite scores that were competitive with boutique systems featuring more expensive Core i7 processors. The Sentinel XK made a strong first impression for Ballistic. It offered an elegant interior design and superb overclocking chops, so we’d definitely recommend it to those looking for a new gaming rig. We also like the inclusion of a three-year warranty. by Nathan Lake Benchmark Results Ballistic Sentinel XK 3DMark Vantage Overall 23216 GPU Score 23187 GPU1 (fps) 71.27 GPU2 (fps) 64.46 CPU Score 23302 CPU1 (Plans/s) 3280.08 CPU2 (Steps/s) 29.49 PCMark Vantage Pro 1.0 Overall 8450 Memories 7121 TV And Movies 5672 Gaming 9097 Music 7743 Communications 7737 Productivity 6904 HDD 3597 SiSoft Sandra 2010 Lite Processor Arithmetic Dhrystone ALU (GIPS) 110.37 Whetstone iSSE3 (GFLOPS) 77.87 Processor Multi-Media Integer x16 iSSE4.2 (Mpixels/s) 203.62 Floating Point x8 iSSSE3 (Mpixels/s) 151.80 Double x4 iSSE2 (Mpixels/s) 82.42 Memory Bandwidth Integer Buffered iSSE2 (GBps) 24.00 Floating-Point Buffered iSSE2 (GBps) 24.00 Cinebench 10 Score 21952 Time* 0:44 POV-Ray 3.7 Beta** 4889.2 Dirt 2 54.9 FarCry 2 (8XAA) 47.91 Left 4 Dead (16XAA) 125.4 * minutes:seconds ** pixels per second Games tested at 2,560 x 1,600.  User Reviews Be the first to write a review of this product Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. Enter A Subject (key words or a phrase): ALL Words (‘digital’ AND ‘photography’) ANY Words (‘digital’ OR ‘photography’) Exact Match ('digital photography'- all words MUST appear together) Home      Copyright & Legal Information      Privacy Policy      Site Map      Contact Us Copyright © 2010 Sandhills Publishing Company U.S.A. All rights reserved.