SLI Rig Ordered! - Page 2

Astu,

I would definitely still order from Monarch in the future. In fact, everytime I've bought a computer, Monarch has always been one of the first places I check. You guys have really good prices usually, and I can tell it's a great company just looking at the reseller ratings.

As for email, I can understand when a company gets a lot of email and may not respond to it all. But like Damaged4Life says, when I'm spending this kind of money on a PC, I expect a response, and a fairly prompt one at that. You definitely pay more ordering from a boutique dealer - sometimes a little (VM), sometimes a lot (Voodoo). But it's that small business mentality that makes it worth it to spend a little more money in my opinion. When you call, you know you're not going to be on hold for 30 minutes to get someone, you know they'll speak fluent English, and there's a good chance the person or persons who built your computer will be the ones giving you technical support.

Well, I got my SLI rig from Velocity Micro today. I haven't had a chance to do any gaming or anything yet. I'm still in the middle of transferring over my files from an external hard drive. I'm also downloading 3DMark03 and 05 to do a little benchmarking.

First impressions:

- I'm very pleased with the look of the case and the wiring of my machine. Everything is nicely tied off and silver rounding is used on the thicker cables.

- I am pleasantly surprised at how quiet the machine is. After reading the CNet and Maximum PC reviews (which both claimed the machine is loud), I was quite worried. I'm glad to say that I don't find the machine loud at all. Perhaps the Ultra video cards are much louder than the 6800GTs.

- I was a little disappointed to see that no overclocking was done to the machine, though I paid extra for "Advanced tuning and overclocking." Perhaps they don't offer any overclocking on the SLI rigs, and that's understandable, but it shouldn't be an option in the configurator if they don't. I might inquire about this to see what their policy is.

- The only problem I seem to be having is some flickering video. I've got the rig connected to my Dell 2000FP 20.1" LCD via DVI. I had no clue which of the DVI ports to connect it to, so I chose the one in the top-left corner. Everything appears fine, but I'm seeing some flickering in the taskbar, and I've noticed it in a few dialogue boxes that have opened too. I'll have to see what happens with the games.

- The packaging was nicely done, and though the binder is not personalized and is kind of cheap, I'm pleased with the bundle that came with this rig. Far Cry, Battlefield 1942, and HL2 all came standard. I can't wait to try them all out.

- The hard drives are louder than I'm used to. You can really hear them when they're chewing on something, but this is not really a huge issue to me.

- I'm pretty amazed at how...well..."zippy" everything is. The machine boots up in no time, and if I right-click on the desktop or open a folder, it happens instantly. Way cool.

That's all for now. I'll be posting a fairly thorough review with pictures and benchmarks sometime very soon.

Like I said, Cyberpower's prices are very tempting, and I know a few people from these boards have ordered from them recently. To me, it just wasn't worth the risk. I read a lot of reviews on them, and there were too many horror stories for my taste.

I ran a couple of benchmarks on my rig. 3Dmark03: 18629, 3DMark05: 8603

These scores seem about average for this setup. I'm still experiencing the flicker issue, thought it's really not something you notice too much. I wanted to get some pics off my digital camera, but when I inserted the Compactflash card into the appropriate slot of the internal card reader I got, the card slipped all the way into the slot and disappeared. I have no idea what happened to it as I can't see it inside the slot. I assume that it must be lodged in the drive somewhere, but I have no idea how I'm going to get it out without taking the whole thing apart. Grr...

Strangely enough, my flickering issues don't appear in games -- at least not in the two games I've tried (UT2004 and Half-Life 2). The games appear flawlessly as far as I can tell, and they run perfectly with everything maxed. My flickering occurs in Windows while I'm just surfing the net or browsing around my desktop. I usually notice it in the upper right-hand corner of windows where the close, minimize, and tile windows buttons are. I also notice it all the time on the anandtech forums, usually by the user icons. I'm using a Dell 2000FP 20" LCD connected via DVI. I have it set at the native resolution of 1600x1200 at 60Hz. My machine currently has four DVI ports with the two video cards. I wonder if I should try plugging the monitor into a different DVI port. I've asked for support from VM, but they haven't responded yet.

The other crazy thing has happened while running 3Dmark03 and 05. On the CPU tests (the ones where you get like 3 FPS throughout the test), I notice that the image on screen bounces up and down about an 1/8th of an inch. All the 3D tests appear perfectly fine, but this happens in all the CPU tests I've run.

Finally, I'm concerned about the temperature of the FX-55. I read on a competitor's site that the Zalman cooler I got is not sufficient to cool the FX-55. After reading this, I downloaded Asus Probe to check the temps and was staggered to see the temp of the chip at 69 degrees C! This has really got me worried, though I haven't experienced any problems yet. I'd be interested to see what temps you're getting, Nomiad.

Well, I would have some pics if my 3.5" media card reader didn't swallow my compact flash card. I'll definitely get some up sometime this weekend.