Boutique Graphics PCs Duke It Out

AVA Direct Hardware, Continued

Our unit came with a dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 GHz) processor and a pair of 1 GB Kingston HyperX PC2-8500 memory modules, connected through an eVGA motherboard based on the nForce 680i SLI chipset. AVADirect overclocked the processor to 3.49 GHz by increasing the FSB frequency, and cooled it with a compact Asetek liquid cooling system.

The Asetek liquid cooling system covers the CPU, beside two Kingston 1 GB modules with blue heatsinks.

Unfortunately, we did not get an SLI setup and opted for a single, standard-edition, GeForce 8800 Ultra card with 768 MB of GDDR3 memory.

The system came with a 150 GB 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor drive and a 500 GB 7,200 RPM Western Digital Caviar drive. The presumable setup would be to have your operating system on the faster Raptor drive, while using the other, slower drive, for storage. Our system was setup for dual boot, preloaded with Windows XP Pro on the Raptor drive, and Windows Vista Home Premium on the Caviar drive. We chose to use the Windows XP Pro OS for benchmarks.

150 GB Raptor drive underneath the 500 GB Caviar drive.

All this gear is powered by a Thermaltake Toughpower 750 Watt power supply.