This $3897 gaming and
graphics system justifies its high price
with lots of speed and excellent
expandability. Peer through the window on
the side of the MTower 64's black-and-gray
midsize tower case, and you'll see
components common to many other systems
we've reviewed. But Xi seems to have found
just the right hardware recipe to create a
screaming-fast PC.
Equipped with a
2.4-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU, 2GB of
DDR400 SDRAM, a single EVGA E-GeForce 6800
Ultra graphics card, and two 300GB hard
drives striped in a RAID 0 array, the MTower
64 AGE-SLI produced a WorldBench 5 score of
130, the highest yet.
Gamers will note that
on our standard graphics tests, which run
Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Unreal
Tournament, the MTower 64 achieved 280
frames per second, the second-fastest rate
we've seen. (The fastest was 283, posted by
the Polywell Poly 939N-FX55.) On tests using
Doom 3 and Far Cry, designed to gauge
high-end graphics capabilities, the
single-card MTower 64 AGE-SLI was even more
impressive: Its frame rates beat out the
dual SLI systems at both 1024-by-768 and
1600-by-1200 resolutions on Far Cry and at
1024 by 768 on Doom 3.
When you're ready to
turn this system into a dual-SLI machine, it
can be upgraded to full SLI status by adding
a second EVGA E-GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics
card to its second PCI Express x16 slot.
The MTower 64's case
feels a bit cheap, given the system's price,
but the interior is well organized,
uncluttered, and easy to access; two big
thumbscrews hold the cover in place. The two
empty hard drive bays and three empty
optical drive bays are easily reached, as
are all of the expansion slots and RAM
sockets.
Getting the
motherboard's onboard sound hardware to work
properly required us to flash the system
BIOS twice, a bug that should be fixed by
the time you read this. Currently Xi is
offering free Audigy sound cards on new
units as a way of bypassing the problem.
When we did get the audio working, the
Logitech X-530 speaker system sounded great.
The five satellite speakers were crisp and
accurate, although the bass from the
subwoofer seemed slightly distorted at high
volumes.
Small (6.8-point)
type was readable on the ViewSonic VP191b
flat-panel display but wasn't the sharpest
we've seen. Likewise, colors were realistic,
but they didn't jump off the screen. The
control buttons on the front of the display
were hard to read and easily confused with
the power button.
The Logitech cordless
keyboard and mouse are a plus. The keyboard
has a sturdy feel, solid key action, and
comes with lots of programmable buttons for
launching programs, going to Web sites, and
controlling your sound system.
Upshot: This very fast, expensive PC
with an SLI motherboard will appeal to
hard-core gamers and graphics enthusiasts
who have deep pockets.
-- Kirk Steers
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