And The Winners Are
First, let us just say that all of these systems are something most of us would like to have. However, not all of us have the money to buy such bleeding edge gear for gaming. But at the end of the day, this is a round-up of the best that is out there. Someone has to win and someone has to lose.
That being said, we must crown the AAC as the best overall system tested in this roundup. It is an incredible buy that performs like a champ. Given that it only runs on a 4000+ CPU while every other system tested was running on a FX-57 processor, the over-clocking done on the AAC produced a machine that was just as stable a system running at normal clock speeds. Call it the Sugar Ray verses Mohammad Ali match-up, it kept up with the established leaders Falcon and Alienware and out performed many that should have outclassed it. It came prepared to fight and did a stellar job.
For overall performance, the speed crown is with the Falcon. We cannot give it the overall system award because we had to monkey around with the settings for a few of the benchmarks to get it to finish the tests. However, it was the king of the hill in the scores and deserves recognition.
Honorable mention goes to Alienware for the high speeds and finishing in the top three most of the time but with the system instability issues at the high clock speeds. We hope that they are soon to re-launch their lines with the upgrades to service and appearance they mentioned to us. However, for now, we cannot award it a prize.
Another honorable mention goes to the ABS, which would also make a solid buy. It is clearly the WYSIWYG computer (what you see is what you get). There are no frills or thrills, just a PC that works at a reasonable price.
If you are in the market for the cream of extreme, these top systems are it. The Falcon and All American are in a class all unto themselves. While the Alienware has speed and performance, it is not the same as the old days of Alienware. It is like Porsche verses Lamborghini and Ferrari. The Porsche is an assembly line car that kicks butt, but it loses some of the hand-made charm and tweaking that you can expect from the other two makers. You can fully customize these two system to whatever your heart desires. Their passion is obviously on the same level as the people for whom they build their systems. We thus would recommend the Falcon and All American rigs to anyone looking for nothing less than the best.
