Origin Genesis: Liquid-Cooled Behemoth Masters Benchmarks and Budgets
The perfomance desktop category plays host to all manner of pricey, powerful PCs. Despite being a relative newcomer to our rankings, Origin has fit right in, topping our charts and our benchmarks with premium components and generous overclocking. The company's latest update to its Genesis is no exception. (The Genesis line is also one of the priciest, though the new version will cost less than its near-$7000 predecessor -- specifically, $6399, as of 1/12/2010.)
The all-new Genesis packs Intel's second-generation Core i7-2600K CPU -- overclocked to a staggering 5GHz, and kept stable with liquid cooling. Origin has further outfitted the machine with 16GB of RAM, and just over 2.1TB of storage -- which includes a pair of 128GB solid-state drives in RAID 0. It earned a score of 223 on our WorldBench 6 benchmark suite, making this overclocked goliath the fastest machine we've seen to date.
Gaming performance was equally impressive, thanks to the three Nvidia GTX 580 GPUs arranged in SLI. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, it reached an average of 101 frames per second. And in the graphically intensive Just Cause 2, we saw an average of 47 frames per second.
Like its predecessor, the latest Genesis is housed in the Corsair 800D chassis. In fact, apart from the updated hardware, it is largely identical. The case is large and spacious, offering hot-swappable hard-drive bays on the front, as well as room inside for more 5.25-inch drives. It's also largely tool-free, with side walls that pop off at the push of a button. The graphics cards are held in place by thumbscrews, but the rest of the bays are accessible by way of sliding plastic latches.
My favorite new chassis feature? The remote-controlled lighting. You can pick your preferred color or simply cycle through them, bathing the interior of the machine with psychedelic rave lights. Sure, it serves no functional purpose. But sometimes bragging rights are their own reward.
Despite the cavernous chassis, there's actually little room for tinkering. Like its predecessor, the Genesis is liquid-cooled. A network of tubes across the CPU and the GPUs make the case's internals cramped, and the 5.25-inch bays are largely blocked by the reservoir. The Genesis packs a multiformat card reader, a Blu-Ray burner, and audio controls up front, but you aren't going to be able to fit much else in there. The motherboard's PCI slots are similarly blocked by the liquid-cooled GPUs.
Connectivity options abound. Hidden behind a panel on the face of the machine are four USB ports and one FireWire port, along with the headphone and microphone jacks. The aforementioned multiformat card reader offers a fifth USB port.
On the rear, you'll find a Serial PS/2 keyboard and mouse combo port, dual gigabit ethernet ports, a pair of eSATA ports, 7.1 analog and optical audio ports, a Bluetooth receiver, and a whipping eight USB 3.0 ports, making this one of the first machines we've reviewed that's focused on next-gen connectivity. The graphics cards offer a total of six DVI ports, and three Mini-HDMI ports.
Origin's updated Genesis outpaces Maingear's $8000 Shift Super Store in general performance, and price. But that's largely a testament to the the impressive performance we've seen out of Intel's Sandy Bridge offerings. And when you don't have a $1000 Core i7-980X CPU or a custom paint job on your balance sheet, you can afford to lower costs -- or in Origin's case, to add more RAM and an internal light show. But despite being the first of many Sandy Bridge desktops to pass through our gates, you can bet that this behemoth won't be bested any time soon.
Sony VAIO VPCJ114FX/B: Wait for the 60-Percent-Off Coupon
Sony's VAIO VPCJ114FX/B All-in-One desktop -- hereafter referred to as the "VAIO" -- sits in a crowded category. The competition is just too stiff, and too powerful, for the system's commanding $1,050 asking price to help it make a strong impression.
We'll give the VAIO some credit: Its 1.86-GHz Intel Pentium P6000 processor,500 Gb hard drive(which you cant upgrade), Two USB ports and a Gigabit Ethernet Port, accompanied by four gigabytes of DDR3-1066 memory, allows the system to achieve a score of 86 on our WorldBench 6 suite of tests. That's about average for the category. But we've reviewed machines in both the Budget and Big Screen All-in-one category that do better. Acer's 23-inch AZ5700-U2112 beats the VAIO on price and performance, clocking in a WorldBench 6 score of 119. Gateway offers up the ZX6951-53, a striking, 23-inch $999 machine that posted a score of 121.
The HP Envy 17 3D: Watch 3D movies on the Go
HP Envy 17 3D HP brings stereoscopic 3D to the Envy 17 laptop, offering an excellent 3D experience with Blu-ray movies. Gaming in 3D needs work, however.
The new Envy 17 with 3D had a single 500GB hard drive rather than a pair of 320GB drives. The CPU, RAM, Blu-ray drive, and GPU were all the same. So I'm not going to dwell on features like USB ports, processor, or networking--those are all pretty much the same. The carryover AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5850 GPU, though, is a key component in enabling stereoscopic 3D; it may also be a weak link, as we'll see.
Dell XPS 17
The newest XPS 17 now supports USB 3.0 (two ports), plus a USB 2.0 port and another USB 2.0/eSATA combo port. These connections are spread throughout the system, which should improve their overall utility. Two are on the back, the eSATA combo port is on the right, and the stand-alone USB 2.0 port is on the left. Dell also includes an SD/MMC card slot that supports the latest SDXC memory card standard.
This Dell Beauty also comes with an Intel Core i7-740QM processor, with an clock speed of 1.73GHz and a turboboost maximum clocking of 2.93GHz, plus 6GB of RAM. An Nvidia GeForce GT 445M discrete graphics chip is also built into the XPS 17, along with 3GB of graphics memory.
