iBuypower 942IL Gamer: Best of the Best?

Features
By Shelton Romhanyi, Don Woligroski
published

The iBuypower Gamer 942IL

We looked to the iBuypower site to find the 942IL, and to our surprise it wasn’t there — either that, or it was just well-hidden. This is the same thing that happened when we reviewed the Gamer Mage 855 system from them at the beginning of 2008; back then we were told that the system could be built with the online configurator, and it would be offered at the promised price at a later date.

Using the online configurator on the iBuypower site, we recreated the Gamer 942IL system for $4,042; iBuypower gave us a spec sheet showing the MSRP of the Gamer 942IL as $3599, so when it’s released it appears it will be a deal compared to custom pricing. It’s still nice to see that, should you wish to do so, iBuypower will make you pretty much anything you want from their parts bin, as long as you’re willing to pay for it.

iBuypower chose to build this particular system around an EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 quad core processor. This processor represents pretty much the fastest you can get right now: four cores and 12 MB of cache all running at 3.2 GHz. This processor has it where it counts, and should be the hot knife cutting through your applications’ butter.

In theory, the best SLI configuration would be made up of two 9800 GX2 cards with four GPUs in total; iBuypower went a small step down from this lofty perch, including two 9800 GTX cards with “only” two GPUs included. However, these cards are no slouch by any means.

GDDR3 RAM is as fast as it gets, usable only with a few choice enthusiast class chipsets, and the 790i is one of them. iBuypower decided to include a full 4 GB of RAM with the 942IL, a bit more than 32-bit Vista can actually use, but the pairing of two 2GB sticks allows the RAM to run in the fast dual-channel configuration.

To recap so far, this system is using the fastest CPU and RAM available paired with some of the fastest video cards available, linked together in an SLI configuration. Looking good!

The included hard drives are two 500 GB units configured in a RAID 0 array, which allows for faster disk reads and writes, but no data redundancy.

The system is powered by a hefty Tuniq 950 watt supply, which, along with a 20x DVD writer and a 16x DVD-ROM, fit within a stylish Thermaltake Xazer-VI MX gaming case. Also included are a Logitech keyboard and mouse.

Shelton Romhanyi
58 Comments Comment from the forums
  • iBuyPower has the WORST support I have ever encountered. I bought a laptop from them which had a design flaw in the lcd (screen cable was too short, opening the screen would loosen it and black out the image). They said it was caused by the user and refused to replace it. I would recommend staying far away from anything they sell.
    Reply
  • Take_Out
    ABS and Tagan are related and seem to have a good quality name in the business as well as being associated with the great Newegg.com.....
    Reply
  • Take_Out
    I meant that they were related to each other and not to iBuyPower.
    Reply
  • trackman2010
    Where are the Crysis benchmarks?
    I would think someone who's going to spend that much money on a PC would like to know how the computer fairs in the mother of all benchmarks.
    How about benchmarking some newer games that are actually a bit more demanding than the old games you're using just to show some high numbers?

    Also, why on earth would someone spend all that money when you can get the same configuration yourself for half the price?
    Tech support is never worth that much money, IMO.
    Reply
  • baracubra
    Also Alienware's top model is only a bit more expensive but it buys u soo much more bragging rights, not to mention their extremely stylish cases..
    Reply
  • baracubra
    If I was gonna dish out that much $$$ I'd go with a better named company with better support, something like Alienware and take their top model; 790i SLI mobo, Intel core 2 Extreme QX9770, 2x SLI 9800 GX2 etc...
    Reply
  • jitpublisher
    Yeah, why are there no Crysis benchmarks here?
    That was the only gaming benchmark that I was planning to take note of when I started the reading the article. This is like reviewing a new system 2 years ago and not running an Oblivian benchmark. Makes no sense?
    Reply
  • BadMannerKorea
    i was going to buy an ibuypower, but decided to make my own. if you spent 3500 on a homebuilt system, that would certainly be better than ibuypower. plus, if you look at the BBB website, they are doing horrible.
    Reply
  • tallguy1618
    I think the game benchmarks for this review absolutely sucked. I mean, comon. You know that somethings wrong when mose of the game abenchmarks are ran in the 100 FPS range. Also, I don't give a crap how these 2 systems run archiac games like Prey and Serious Sam or even Quake 4. When is Toms Hardware going to realize that they need to update their benchmarks significally? The main thing I do on PC's is game, and right now I have no idea which system to choose because of the crappy game choices for benchmarking. I was disgusted by this review and I know there are others that feel the same way.
    Reply
  • johnbilicki
    For that money I could have built an XP-64 bit system with two 2GB sticks, a raid 0 raptor boot with a TB raid 1 D:\, and saved a ton of money by getting a real quad core CPU from AMD versus an Intel duo-core or dual-dual-core. Where is the dedicated audio card? I'd skip buying Creative of course with their known desire to not support their products. I don't play any of those games and I still like seeing Oblivion on benchmarks. Where is Crysis? Even though it's not really my kind of game it's benchmarking value is rather obvious. Lastly what is the warranty on the system? Do you get five years on the hard drive like you do if you buy a couple of Seagates? Or a ten year life-time warranty when you buy memory like Corsair?

    Pre-built systems may look nice though they generally are built for people who are going to burn money once every two or three years on a new system. I'm still happy with my 939 setup and won't bother to upgrade until socket AM3 any way.
    Reply