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Product summary
CNET Editors' ChoiceJun 07
The good: Outstanding gaming performance; flawless, attractive design; more aggressive overclocking than the competition.
The bad: Support Web site could use some beefing up; minor drop-off in Quake 4 at higher resolutions.
The bottom line: Maingear's F131 SLI takes it to the high-end PC competition, earning itself an Editors' Choice in the process. Without having the full picture of DirectX 10 performance, you're potentially taking a risk buying a high-end gaming PC now. But if you need to make that purchase today, we recommend Maingear with enthusiasm.
Specifications: Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4 GHz); RAM installed: 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM; Hard drive: 250 GB Standard; See full specs
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 06/29/2007
- Released on: 06/01/2007
Maingear's new F131 SLI gaming PC comes at our recent Velocity Micro Editors' Choice winner strong and hard. Both are equally well-designed, and while the Maingear is a bit more expensive at $4,200, it also includes a few features the Velocity Micro lacks, at least in the PC it sent us. This story is ultimately a battle of graphics platforms. Maingear is powered by two overclocked Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS cards. The Velocity system uses two ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT's. We've found issues with both graphics cards and the few DirectX 10 games currently available. But between these two systems today, it's a toss-up. Each has its strengths. If you're passionate about a current-generation DirectX 9 game, we'd take the Maingear. If you have your sights set on video encoding or high-resolution OpenGL-based gaming, we'd take Velocity Micro. As all-around PCs, both are winners.
Both the Velocity Micro and the Maingear systems represent an aggressive gaming PC tweaked to the height of performance all while keeping within a semi-reasonable price range. The specs compare as follows:
| Maingear F131 SLI | Velocity Micro Raptor DCX | |
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600,overclocked to 3.2GHz | Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600,overclocked to 3.0GHz |
| Motherboard | EVGA Nvidia NForce 680i SLI | Intel BadAxe II 975X |
| Memory | 2GB of 1,066MHz DDR2 SDRAM | 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM |
| Graphics | (2) 640MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS | (2) 512MB ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT |
| Hard drive | (2) 500GB 7,200 rpm hard drives | 400GB 7,200 rpm hard drive, 150GB 10,000 rpm hard drive |
| Optical drives | 20x dual layer DVD burner, 16x DVD-ROM drive | 20x dual layer DVD burner, 16x DVD-ROM drive |
| Operating system | Windows Vista Ultimate | Windows Vista Home Premium |
You can see from this chart that Maingear took everything Velocity Micro had and tweaked it just a bit more. It has a faster CPU, faster RAM, and more video memory in its Nvidia 3D cards. The differences in video chips, Nvidia on the Maingear and ATI on the Velocity, also represent a major battleground in PC gaming right now. You'll see what we mean on performance, although the story is more complicated than what appears on our charts.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
 |
Rendering Multiple CPUs | |
Rendering Single CPU |
On iTunes and Photoshop, the Maingear took a healthy lead over the Velocity system, showing that the F131 SLI is a faster photo editor and MP3 encoder. To our surprise, Velocity Micro held out on CineBench, maintaining roughly the same margin that Maingear did on the first two charts. We suspect that has to do with the Velocity's fast 10,000 rpm hard drive, the only component with a performance edge over its Maingear equivalent. If you spend lots of time encoding video, the Velocity is a better pick.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
|
2,048 x 1,536 (4x AA, 8x AF) | |
1,600 x 1,200 (4x AA, 8xAF) | |
1,280 x 1,024 (4x AA, 8x AF) |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
|
2,048 x 1,536 (4x AA, 8x AF) | |
1,600 x 1,200 (4x AA, 8xAF) | |
1,280 x 1,024 (4x AA, 8x AF) |
Now it gets interesting. First, Quake 4. Maingear looks solid until you see its 2,048 x 1,536 score. It's still plenty fast, but not as fast the Velocity Micro system on that one resolution. If you can drop $4,000 on a gaming PC, chances are you won't skimp on the display, and will want to play on high resolutions. We're a bit concerned that the Maingear lost a step as the resolution went up, but this only affects you if you have the display to support the higher settings.
FEAR presents us with a more complicated issue. Using the Logitech G5 mouse (original edition) and Saitek Eclipse keyboard that Maingear sent with this system, we saw a major frame-rate drop on the second run using our normal testing method, which calls for us to run FEAR's built-in performance test three times within the same application session. Closing out and restarting the game between runs gave us more stable frame rates. We then tried running FEAR on the Maingear system with the Velocity's mouse and keyboard (really just rebranded Creative hardware) and saw the same good scores--restarting between runs--as we did using the original input devices. That evened things out enough in our mind to convince us that what we were seeing was, in the words of our Labs Manager, "a methodology issue," rather than a problem with this system. To be certain, we hooked up the G5 and the Saitek keyboard to two different Falcon Northwest Mach Vs we have in house at the moment (that we'll be reviewing later) and saw the same FEAR frame rate drop-off as with the Maingear when we ran all the test runs within the same session.
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