Attention experienced PC Gaming veterans, it’s time to ditch your trusty but woefully outdated beige Windows 95 operating system. Yes, he has treated you well. Yes, you’ve logged a legendary amount of hours with Minesweeper. Yes, you’ve unlocked the secret Solitaire deck with naked face cards (scandalous!). Commander Keen? Children’s game.
Hell, it even works Condemn.
However, as much as you love the After Dark screensaver, if you’re going to try the latest and greatest (there’s now a Doom 3!), you’re going to need something new. Somewhat overclocked and water cooled. With LED. Blue LEDs! And it has to be done to order. Space Marines don’t shop at Best Buy, so why should you?
Puget Systems makes desktop computers, laptops, and server towers, with more customization options than NASA can count. For their line of gaming machines, we take a look at the Deluge-i L3, a rig we custom built with aggressive components into a flashy and insultingly powerful gaming PC.
For starters, there’s the Quad Core Intel Core 2 Extreme overclocked to 4 GHz and 4 GB of OCZ Reaper RAM. In the graphics department, three 768MB GeForce 8800 Ultras run in triple-SLI. Vista Ultimate progresses smoothly with a 5.9 out of 5.9 on Micosoft’s experience index. We all know that Vista is a heavy dinosaur, but in this case, we didn’t find the need to upgrade to XP. It has a 40GB Xceed Ultra solid-state drive for quick access to programs and the like, with a second 500GB Seagate Barracuda to host our legally acquired content. Even access to Intertubes is fast; A Killer network interface card really improved our ping and helped increase our headshot count. All of this is packaged in a rugged Antec P182 case, designed to keep decibel levels low. Too bad there’s the Koolance water cooling system that includes 3 large fans that rumble over your radiator. But it’s better to be blasting than blasting: Even with all the cooling gear, this monster idles at about 85° F, easily reaching 140° F during our most rigorous tests. doom 3 and Peggle sessions. You’ll want to consider some noise-cancelling headphones or a set of desktop speakers – when fully operational, this beast makes more noise than a monster truck rally.
If you don’t already know, this platform is overkill. Solid state drives are absurdly expensive, even considering the increase in data transfer. The benefits of a separate network interface card will be negligible in a home network. And unless you want to create Skynet in your gaming crib, you don’t really need triple SLI; we couldn’t even run this setup. crisis with complete specifications. Many factors could have been swapped out to result in a quieter, cooler machine. But then again, we could have tried two quad cores, a few extra terabytes of hard drive space, and gone with a fog machine to complete that ’80s space station vibe.
DIYers take note: we carefully priced the components that made up our Deluge (method: Google + newegg + napkin). If you bought each piece separately, the cost would be about $6,000. The Puget package weighs less than $9,600. You get support, service, parts warranty, lots of useful benchmarks, and hardware information, but you’ll have to decide if the convenience of having someone else do all the legwork is worth nearly $4k.
