- CNET Editors' Rating 8.6/10 Excellent Editorial policies >>
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.
Specs: Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4 GHz); RAM installed: 2 GB DDR II 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.
While we don't have an answer as to what was causing this problem, which we and the various vendors involved are still working on, we do have FEAR scores. And the result is that Maingear beat the Velocity, with no drop-off as the resolution climbs. Given the near-universality of DirectX 9 in current generation games, we have to value FEAR prowess more than Quake 4's OpenGL speed as far as overall gaming. OpenGL-based games, while by no means extinct, are becoming less and less common.
If you're wondering why we don't have a DirectX 10 game in our testing suite yet, the answer is that we don't like any of the currently available options. ATI-based systems don't seem to like the Lost Planet test, Nvidia has a weird flicker on Company of Heroes, and questionable claims about anti-aliasing give us doubts about the Call of Juarez benchmark. Rather than report numbers from games that aren't quite ready to be put to work, we're going to hold off until something more robust and universally applicable emerges for testing purposes. Finding such a game is one of our primary missions at E3 this year, so stay tuned for what we uncover.
Aside from gaming, we also have to consider the graphics platform of each of these systems for video purposes. We've found that ATI's (and thus, the Velocity Micro's) HD video capabilities in Windows Vista are superior to Nvidia's, at least today. It's not a video quality issue, but ATI's drivers scale Windows-based HD video properly to a 1080p television. Nvidia-based systems overscan, cutting off the edges of the 1080p content. We'd be more concerned about this issue if Velocity Micro actually offered an HD optical drive option with its system, although you can always add one post-purchase. Maingear does offer a Blu-ray burner (for an additional $750), which we're glad to see. Just know that you if you decide to make that upgrade on the Maingear, you may have to play with the settings on both your TV and your video driver to get a satisfactory video image, at least until Nvidia gets its graphics drivers squared away.
If you look back at our specs chart, you'll see that Maingear sent us this system with Windows Vista Ultimate. We'd like to see more vendors include Ultimate, if for no other reason than the remote desktop capabilities that don't come in Vista Home Premium. Velocity's Raptor DCX didn't come with Ultimate, but you can add it via its configurator for $120, which brings the price of that config to $4,140, still $60 less than this Maingear.
As close as the Maingear and the Velocity compete in the other categories, they also come very close to each other on support. Both offer three years of parts and labor coverage with their systems, perhaps the longest standard warranties remaining in the PC industry. Neither has 24-7 phone support, but they both have reasonable operating hours, Maingear's from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. PT, Monday through Saturday. And while it doesn't have it quite yet, Maingear will be adding remote support capabilities to its tech support arsenal. Velocity Micro offers this today. Where Velocity Micro distances itself is its support Web site. Both vendors offer online support chat, but Velocity Micro has many more written resources available on its Web site. Maingear's is still fairly sparse.
Find out more about how we test desktop systems.
System configurations:
ABS Ultimate X Striker Elite
Windows Vista Ultimate; 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800; 4,096MB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz; 768MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX; 150GB Western Digital 10,000rpm Serial ATA/150 hard drive
Dell XPS 710 H2C
Windows XP Professional SP2; 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (overclocked to 3.2GHz); 4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM; two 768MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX; two 150GB Western Digital 10,000rpm Serial ATA/150 hard drives (RAID 0); 750GB Seagate 7,200rpm hard drive
Maingear F131 SLI (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600)
Windows Vista Ultimate; 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (overclocked to 3.2GHz); 2GB 1,066MHz DDR2 SDRAM; two 640MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS; two 500GB 7,200 rpm Western Digital hard drives
Maingear X-Cube
Windows Vista Ultimate; 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800; 2GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 768MB GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics card; 750GB Seagate 7,200rpm hard drive
Velocity Micro Raptor DCX (ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT)
Windows Vista Home Premium; 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (overclocked to 3.0GHz); 2GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; two 512MB ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics cards; 400GB 7,200rpm Western Digital hard drive; 150GB 10,000rpm Western Digital hard drive
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- ATI Radeon
User opinions
Rating from 3 users
WRITE YOUR OWN REVIEW How would you rate this product?
-
9/10 Spectacular July 11, 2007
"I Definitely Recommend Maingear" Read more >>
-
9/10 Spectacular July 24, 2007
"You Won't Regret Your Purchase! Very Pleased Customer! =)" Read more >>
-
9/10 Spectacular July 11, 2007
"A+ in my book!" Read more >>
- WRITE YOUR OWN REVIEWSee all 3 user opinions >>
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