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| AVADirect SFF Gaming PC/Workstation |
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Heavy Gear October 2008 • Vol.8 Issue 10 Page(s) 28 in print issue |
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AVADirect SFF Gaming PC/Workstation |
This rig is designed for travel. A sturdy, mid-tower Silverstone Sugo SG04B-H, which features a die-cast aluminum carrying handle, lets AVADirect pack this system with top-notch hardware without abandoning a portable form factor. I was initially worried the crowded mid-tower wouldn’t have enough airflow to vent out the hot air, but the two 120mm, 1,200rpm fans at the front of the really drove the air to the 80mm rear and 120mm side-panel fans. For processing power, AVADirect included dual Intel Xeon 5450 processors that are cooled by Swiftech MCX-VPro heatsinks. The MCX-VPro’s thick, long aluminum pins took up a lot of free space near the processor block, but the memory, video card, and storage drives were situated away from the processors, so working inside the case was doable. 16GB of Kingston DDR2-667MHz dual-rank (doubles the amount of RAM chips by using the backside of the RAM) ValueRAM and three 1TB Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SAS drives in a RAID 5 configuration cover both workstation performance and data protection needs, while an XFX GeForce GTX 280 gives this system gaming power. Considering the SFF Gaming PC/Workstation only had one graphics card, 12.66fps in Crysis and 28fps in World in Conflict are impressive. When we backed the resolution down to 1,900 x 1,200, it produced playable frame rates of 35fps in Crysis and 65fps in World in Conflict. In terms of image rendering, its 22452 multithreaded score in Cinebench 10 and 5097.9pps in POV-Ray 3.7 beta are some of the highest results we’ve seen. The same can also be said for this rig’s SiSoft Sandra Lite scores, which are highlighted by 99,271 Dhrystone ALU and 78,174 Whetstone iSSE3 marks. As a workstation, its SPECviewperf 10 results are much lower than you’d see with a workstation graphics card, such as the Quadro FX 5600, but the GTX 280 does not include any of the application-specific driver configurations or tuned hardware that you’d typically find on a workstation graphics card, so the numbers aren’t surprising. More importantly, the SPEC-viewperf 10 results show that you could perform professional workstation tasks on the go, albeit much less quickly than a traditional workstation (which are also available from AVADirect). With the SFF Gaming PC/Workstation’s portable design and powerful hardware, it’s a good fit for power users who need a system that can do a little bit of everything. The sturdy, SFF design also helps accommodate those who want to take the rig to a LAN party or run workstation applications away from home.  by Nathan Lake Specs: CPU: 3GHz Intel Xeon X5450 (2x); Motherboard: SuperMicro X7DCA-L (Intel 5400 chipset); RAM: 16GB Kingston ValueRAM (dual-rank) DDR2-667; HDD: 1TB Seagate Barracuda ES.2 (3x; RAID 5); GPU: XFX GeForce GTX 280; PSU: Silverstone Strider ST1000-NV (1,000W); OS: Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit)
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