First of all, Amazon rocks. With Prime I exercised the 1 day delivery option for an extra four bucks. Ordered it at 12:30 p.m. and it was delivered at 9:45 a.m. the next day. Amazing.
The machine is smoking fast and I am running Starcraft II on Ultra and it is smooth as silk. Plenty of RAM and vid card is both a great chip and a good value (although it is an off-brand which is odd as the motherboard/PSU/HD are all at least solid brands if not top notch, such as an ASUS MB). There is some good room to expand although some of the cabling is a little tight across the expansion slots.
The oddities/minor annoyances:
1) Only 1 case fan blowing out the back. For a system this powerful that is too few. There are places to install your own fans in the case (which I did) although several of them aren't available because of installed components (the top ones are blocked by the ends of the CD drive and the placement of the CPU cooling unit). I put in a 120mm case fan blowing out the side and it has brought my temps down to very acceptable levels even under decent load.
2) The HD was not installed in the drive rack. It was actually rattling around in there connected only to its cable, but not attached into the racks. The fact that I could hear it clunking around before I opened the box was distressing but it seemed to work okay. For those not used to getting inside the case and putting in a drive I would think it would be even more disconcerting even though it is pretty easy to clip it in there.
3) The power supply vents directly down. Why they set it up this way I don't know. The case does have feet to provide space for the air to flow but if you sit your case on carpet that sort of goes away and you have to prop it up a bit. I still haven't found a permanent solution to this.
Overall: A solid machine with some weirdness that keeps it from being absolutely perfect. However, for the price it is a lot of computer.
| Processor | 2.8 hertz core_i5 |
|---|---|
| RAM | 8 GB DIMM |
| Hard Drive | 1 TB SATA II |
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GTX460 1GB |
| Card Description | dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 1000 MB |
