Boutique Graphics PCs Duke It Out

Does twice the price ever produce a product that's twice as nice? Systems from AVA Direct and Digital Storm compete to answer that question.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] index.html

Any reason you didn't use 3dmark06? Now I can't compare these systems with reviews of other systems from other sites.

Then post the results with an *, all the other sites use it and it makes comparing systems easier.

Be nice camn, the reason for the comparison is to ultimately show performance as a function of value. Of course performance as a function of price as you stated is obvious. That is not the point. Perhaps they did not make it clear enough, but that is not worth getting upset about. A polite PM is all it takes mate.

I like the review but its not a true apples to apples comparison. I mean, the paint job alone on the Digital Storm setup really jacks up the price which has absolutely no performance gain. The comparison should have been done with no cosmetic enhancements that makes the price go up. Even then, by using the very best components there is a huge price premium for a small gain in performance. (Then again, look at the 8800GT vrs. the GTX-what a bargain!) Even that aside, I still think comparing value vrs performance is good, but not when including options like a custom paint job that has no performance impact whatsoever but pushes the price way up.

Concerning AVA Direct:

Poor, lazy and lacking in customer service and technical expertise.

Spoke with a salesman named Misha who claimed to be CEO of the company and one of 4 owners. First red flag: Why is the CEO working in the capacity of a Salesman?? What kind of an operation is this? I enquired with Misha about a high-end gaming rig. Misha kept pushing me back to the site to configure my builds; upon doing so, I asked Misha via email for input regarding cost savings tweaks to the 2 system builds I had configured, at his request, and for obvious reasons. I then went back & forth via email with him responding to irrelevant questions designed to hide his lacking of technological prowess and he continued to push me back to the site with no answers to my questions. He finally recommended an SLI, DDR2, Q6850 over a single video card, DDR3, Q9650 solution. When I asked him to explain why, what the trade offs were etc., he got extremely hostile and started shouting out me and then closed with “as CEO, I’m going to refuse your business” and hung up on me. Before he hung up on me, I told him how shocked I was at how he was conducting himself and that I was going to post my experience with him all over the net. It was at this point that he said he could care-a-less and hung up. There’s one more happenstance I’d like to point out that is indicative of this individual's incompetence and lack of foresight. When I first spoke to him, I shared with him how I had come to be in contact with his company by way of a negative posting I read herein concerning one of his competitors. You should also know that based on pas experiences other computer manufacturers' tech support, I called AVA's tech support to see what they were like and found that their hours were only 8 am to 5pm EST M-F. What a joke.

I think you're fairly biased because you ignored the fact that Tom's Hardware takes whatever system the company decides to send.

When a $3000 system has a $200 paint job, you expect to pay around $3200

Let me quote the article:

"The lower-cost AVA Direct system leads the Digital Storm Twister Extreme by 28% in overall value, so it's a better deal for anyone who fits within its budget range. The Twister Extreme will still be worth the added expense to high-budget gamers, simply because of its capabilities at high resolutions."

It looks like the more expensive system got a fair shake. You have to remember that "every" review will compare one thing to another, so they just picked the closest two systems they had.