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5.0 stars
"THE BEST GAMING PC!!"
Pros: awesome gaming
Cons: expensive but w/e
Summary: Like the title says, its the best... AROUND... nothings' ever goona keep you down!Updated
The Voodoo Omen a121x Extreme Gamer PC ($6,817 direct without monitor), which uses ATI's CrossFire technology, was awesome. Like Gandalf's Glamdring (his sword from The Lord of the Rings), the latest Omen is a work of art, and in the right hands, it can be used to make short work of your (online) enemies. Its beautiful obsidian metal-and-glass visage is so stunning that hiding it under a desk or cabinet would be a sin. There's no denying that the custom Voodoo "MAGA" case was built to show off the beauty of the system builder's art, and it encloses a whole bunch of top-shelf components, including ATI's dual graphics card solution. Just make sure you have a 30-inch widescreen display capable of displaying 2,560-by-1,600 resolution: Playing on anything less would be a waste.
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The Voodoo MAGA case is awesome. Angular and wickedly hard-edged, its seductive lines catch your eye in pleasing new ways every time you look at it. Inside, a dark-colored liquid flows through clear tubes, cooling off the overclocked Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU and the GPUs and graphics memory on the dual ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire graphics cards. This advanced cooling arrangement helps the blazing PC and its hot components maintain a manageable operating temperature without resorting to loud fans. The Omen a121x is not whisper-quiet by any means, but it's quieter than many of the mainstream and entry-level systems I've tested on the PC Magazine Labs bench. I truly believe that its cooling fans won't be a problem while you're playing online, but if your ears are that sensitive, Voodoo does sell totally fanless PCs under its EDEN marque.
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I also like the Omen's Matrix Orbital VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) readout, which uses a front-mounted matrix display to inform you about the desktop's condition. It quickly relays information about system uptime, the time, new e-mail, memory usage, and hard drive capacity. Though other systems I've reviewed sport front-mounted displays, this one is more informative and less gimmicky than many others I've seen.
Looks aren't everything, though. Mind-numbing performance is what this rig is built for. Thanks to the overclocked FX-60 processor, four 10,000-rpm SATA drives, and the ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire graphics, the Omen garnered the best scores we've seen to date on several benchmark tests: 3DMark05 at 1,024-by-768 and 1,600-by-1,200; SYSmark 04 SE overall and Internet Content Creation; CineBench; Adobe Photoshop CS2; and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory at 1,600-by-1,200. In some cases the Omen's margin over other worthy machines was only a couple of percentage points, but it still beat them nonetheless. I believe this demonstrates that the ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire subsystem is graphically as powerful as nVidia's GeForce 7800 GTX SLI solution. Keep in mind, though, that nVidia's GeForce processors are much better at running the OpenGL graphics used by games such as Doom 3.
One annoyance about CrossFire is the huge external cable and dongle connecting the two cards. The nVidia SLI solution uses a much neater internal card bridge. The CrossFire cable can also be an annoyance if you're the type of gamer who brings your desktop to LAN parties: You'll need to disconnect the cable before moving the Omen.
It's highly unlikely that a graphics worker will be able to convince his boss to buy an almost $7,000 PC to do graphics tasks, but that said, the Omen a121x is capable of powering through CineBench, Windows Media Encoder, and Photoshop CS2 tasks. The Omen completed the Photoshop tasks in under a minute; on our tests, only one other desktop has managed this.
Compared with similar nVidia SLI-powered offerings from Velocity Micro and Falcon Northwest, the Voodoo Omen a121x offers a bit more performance on some (but not all) benchmark tests. It's arguably the most attractive of the three, but you really have to desire it to stomach the price tag. Since all three are extremely customizable, you can choose variations on memory, hard drives, and graphics card choices. Anyone entertaining a purchase of a Voodoo PC Omen probably isn't thinking about saving money, but you can get almost the same performance levels with a less expensive Velocity Micro or Falcon.
Yes, you can build a gaming PC at home with the same components for a lot less money, but then you're also responsible for tweaking the system for solid gaming performance and for any additional support in case your overclocking causes instability. And you can't buy the MAGA case separately. Buying a Voodoo Omen is akin to buying a Mercedes S550 and then having West Coast Customs pop by and "pimp your ride." It's overkill and completely impractical, yet I wouldn't have it any other way.
