By Jason Evangelho, Contributor
Maingear’s F131 SuperStock gaming PC plays big brother to the system builder’s petite Potenza, packing in dual Samsung 840 Solid State drives. closed loop liquid cooling, and two of NVIDIA’s GTX Titans in SLI. With any quality boutique vendor, however, the reasons compelling you to purchase their system lie within the more nuanced details. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By gaming standards, the HP Envy Phoenix h9-1420t’s appearance is positively subdued. This midsize tower PC has some red backlighting and a clear pane so that you can gaze at the liquid cooling unit, but aside from that it could easily pass for a conventional HP desktop. Although it doesn’t have much in the way of bling, the Phoenix delivers better-than-average performance at a cheaper-than-boutique price. Down-the-road upgrade options, on the other hand, are limited by its decidedly nonenthusiast motherboard.
Our $1840 h9-1420t test configuration sported an unlocked 3.5GHz Intel Core i7-3770K processor. Thanks to the liquid cooling unit, the system had no problem maintaining 4GHz, and it likely has at least a little more headroom. The Pegatron (that’s Asus’s OEM arm) 2AD5 motherboard offers minimal overclocking controls in its BIOS, but it isn’t completely locked down. You can set each core’s maximum frequency multiplier separately, but you get no provisions for tweaking the operating voltage, for instance. The board also has just a single full-size PCIe slot, so you can forget any dual-card graphics upgrade via SLI or CrossFire.
Fortunately, HP picked a strong graphics card, inserting an Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. With that card in place, the Phoenix managed a playable frame rate in Dirt Showdown right up to the 2560 by 1600 resolution of our 30-inch test display. The game wasn’t as silky smooth at that resolution as it was at lower ones, but it was certainly playable. Should you decide to buy an h9-1420t online, HP allows you to customize the configuration to a degree, but your options don’t include Nvidia’s best GPU, the GeForce GTX 690.
The other core components on our test machine included 12GB of DDR3-1600 memory and a 2TB, 7200-rpm hard drive, which helped the h9-1420t produce a very good WorldBench 8 score of 87. A solid-state drive would have boosted the score even more, but that option wasn’t available when we ordered our evaluation unit. HP has since corrected that omission, but there’s no getting around that single multilane PCIe slot, which is a puzzling design decision in a PC whose primary reason for existence is performance.
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld
The simplest way to make your PC games look better is to buy a better graphics card. If you already have the best graphics card money can buy (one of these, perhaps), the next step is to install a duplicate and make them work together. Most savvy PC users have a machine with a discrete graphics card, but adding a second or even third card and running them together can lead to a big performance boost in demanding PC games.
This job can also be a little tricky, though the process has gotten much easier in the past decade. Consumer-class multi-GPU graphics configurations date all the way back to 1998 when 3dfx debuted the Voodoo 2 and the accompanying SLI, or Scan-Line Interleave technology. In those days, when two Voodoo 2 cards were installed in a system and configured properly, each card would alternate rendering odd and even scan lines. The end result was typically a huge increase in performance, with frame rates nearly double that of a single Voodoo 2.
Most modern GPUs from Nvidia and AMD can be paired up to work together as well, but they work very differently than the Voodoo 2 of old. Modern graphics cards running in multi-GPU configurations typically render alternate frames or split a frame horizontally (or into tiles), with each GPU working on a particular portion of the frame. But pairing multiple graphics cards together still can substantially increase performance.
The process is actually pretty simple, so let’s get started!
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld
