For little over 1500£ with all the additional items it still comes in well under what you would get from the big OEMs like Dell, or HP.

Okay the case isn't the nicest but then again in the right setting it does look good..

I wonder how well it would start to perform once it's been loaded up with a few more drives and another 6 months down the road with all the updates to vista and 6 months worth of dust.. Wonder how well it would perform with Window XP 64-bit...

I'm not surprised it's doesn't have on-board sound as well that would just take away from overall memory bandwidth and slow the machine down..

Wonder how it performs in Age of Conan and the newest bred of "the only way to play this is with everything switched on" at 2048 x 1576 or something like that....

Given it's a complete gaming rig that's not a bad price..

But I didn't see the true test of it - you didn't test it to see how well it played "solitare"

Not a bad price for all that gear, i've seen just the box itself go for that much with these so-called "xtreme" systems (i'm looking at you Alienware)

If you are transferring a file larger than 32MB, I'd have thought the cache would be useless, better to stream straight through. The cache is there because often the data you want is the same as you got before, or very close to it. If you are reading a lot of small files all the time, or at least the same blocks, better to keep them in a buffer of fast memory and read that fast buffer instead of the relatively slow HDD.

Maybe I'm being a divvy, but why do you need a cpu with an FSB speed of 1333 MHz when your mobo can only tackle up to 800 MHz?

And surely half the fun of overclocked gear is building / breaking and overclocking it your self?

Hi Dan,

The CPU is quad-pumped from the FSB so 200->800 MHz on the board translates to 800-3200 MHz on the CPU.. strange, I thought X48 was spec'd from 200-400MHz FSB but then again i've not looked that closely either.

Cheers

Specified by Intel for 200-400MHz, sure... but then Asus have always ignored such trival matters.

I have this case myself as the basis for my home-built. Lovely thing, except that because the whole thing is porous, the sound containment isn't the best, and airflow isn't quite as controllable as it could be. Dust is also a bit of an issue. It looks better than you think though... nice black block, quite sleek-looking and understated. I don't want something that looks like it came from the set of Dr. Who. Also very cheap for what it is.

Not a bad price, no... depends on the warranty care though, otherwise may as well build yourself.

The text seems to suggest this is fastest machine reviewed to date, but the Alienware Area 51 ALX scores better results across the board. That review compares it with the Mesh Q8, please can we always have closest equivalent system's figures shown on any performance graph, as otherwise its just a bunch of fairly meaningless numbers.

But does it run Crysis on full?