CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 08/25/2005
- Updated on: 11/07/2009
It's one of the fastest PCs on the planet. It's also one of the most expensive. The $4,840 Maingear F131 SLI-AMD is a gaming dynamo, with dual Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards and a dual-core AMD processor to match. It's noisy, and we have some other minor design quibbles, but overall, Maingear has built a powerful high-end gaming PC that stands tall with other systems in its class.
Featuring the same Lian-Li case as the recent Editors' Choice-winning Overdrive PC Torque SLI, the F131's windowed side panel and front door add a little visual interest. Unfortunately, because the fan is mounted on the side panel, the latter can't go very far when you remove it; the fan's power cord has little extra slack unless you unplug it.
For a system with three large cooling fans, the Maingear F131 SLI-AMD is reasonably quiet, but we greatly prefer--and expect, given the price--the near silence of a liquid-cooled tower such as the Alienware Aurora 7500. Still, it's roomy on the inside, with plenty of extra drive bays (both internal and external) and three open PCI slots. In addition to the four aft USB 2.0 ports, you'll find two in front, below the door. Unfortunately, those are the only ports located there; like the Overdrive, the F131 lacks the front FireWire port, headphone jack, and microphone jack conveniently found in most modern systems. We can live without the front-side FireWire ports, and fortunately both vendors offer the Sound Blaster Platinum sound card (for an added $200), whose drive-bay port plate offers a convenient way to bring headphone jacks to the front of your case.
Design quibbles aside, the Maingear F131 SLI-AMD is a pull-no-punches PC. The combination of its overclocked dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ processor and 1GB of 400MHz SDRAM proved potent indeed; its CNET Labs' SysMark 2004 scores are the second fastest among dual-core systems we've seen (bested, and only by a hair, by the Velocity Micro ProMagix DCX). The F131 also excelled on our dual-core benchmarks, finishing faster than all but the Apple Power Mac G5 on our iTunes MP3-encoding test and first overall on both our Adobe Photoshop CS and Sorensen video-encoding tests. Its overclocked SLI GeForce graphics cards produced exceptional 3D test results, although a handful of other PCs that also had overclocked 3D cards edged it out. Still, you should have little to no trouble playing anything you want at full detail settings.
Like most of the other high-end systems we've reviewed lately, the Maingear F131 SLI-AMD packs a pair of fast 10,000rpm 74GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives (in a RAID 0 configuration for contiguous storage) as the main hard drives. A 300GB Maxtor drive works as a storage drive, keeping space-gobbling media files separate from performance-hungry applications. Maingear keeps with the dual-everything theme by providing both a DVD-ROM drive and a double-layer DVD burner. Although most users would probably prefer a wireless mouse and keyboard, the F131 caters to hard-core gamers with its wired Microsoft keyboard and Logitech MX518 Gaming Mouse--both excellent components. You'll have to supply your own speakers. Maingear has several options: the Creative Labs GigaWorks S750 7.1 set among them for $499. A number of ViewSonic LCDs are also available.
The Maingear F131 SLI-AMD is BYO games; not a single one comes in the box. At least Maingear offers a few worthwhile applications, thanks to Roxio Media Creator Suite, which provides the basics for disc burning. Maingear also provides eTrust's EZ Antivirus 2005 suite for free. You don't get any productivity software, though. If you want Microsoft Office, you'll have to pay $200 for the most basic package.
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