While the various flavors of games console have introduced gaming to the living room, the weapon of choice for most serious gamers is the PC. Not many would settle for an off-the-shelf gaming PC like the one in front of me, opting for a self build or custom model instead. Those who fall in the latter group will definitely be interested in the Luxury edition gaming PC from Pure PC. Benefiting from an open design that's said to help dissipate heat without the need for too many noisy fans, the high-end gaming rig is powered by a Core i7 chip which can be overclocked to 5GHz, at least two NVIDIA graphics cards and up to 24GB of memory. There's a choice of twin SSD or dual HDD storage, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 connectivity and a Blu-ray burner. So how much would such a system cost? Read on to find out ...
The first thing you notice about the Luxury edition PC from Pure PC is the lack of the familiar box to contain the gaming PC's computing components. This open plan model sports a custom DARWINmachine chassis in either red or blue brushed anodized aluminum frame with Quattro Carbon or Supermatte White Ecoresin trim. All components attach to the central aluminum backbone that's said to act like a huge heatsink, keeping things cool and quiet, and making everything accessible, adjustable and removable for easy modification.
Sprouting from an ASUS Rampage III Gene or Formula mainboard is an Intel Core i7 990x Extreme Edition processor running at 3.46GHz (overclockable to 5GHz), supported by up to 24GB of Kingston HyperX T1 Series DDR3 memory. Graphics configurations on offer include a couple of NVIDIA GTX 580, a couple of AMD Radeon 6970 or three SLI NVIDIA GTX 580 cards. Storage takes the shape of two 128GB Kingston V+ solid state drives or a pair of 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black HDDs spinning at 7200RPM, but there's expansion for up to four drives.
Feeding in optical media is made possible by the inclusion of a Slim Blu-ray disc burner, with space for another optical addition. There are seven USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, a 24-1 media card reader, a PS/2 port for old school peripherals, IEEE 1394a and Gigabit LAN. Integrated 6-channel SupremeFX X-Fi 2 audio is supplemented by S/PDIF out. At the very opposite end to low-power PCs like the fit-PC3, power for this beauty is provided by a fully modular Kingston 1200W PSU.
The Luxury edition PC is proudly (and in my opinion, quite correctly) described by its creators as a work of art. It's hand-built and custom made for each order and is offered with Windows 7 Premium 64-bit edition as standard or Ultimate 64-bit as an option. Benchmark testing on the standard configuration has resulted in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm gameplay being rendered at over 390 frames per second and boot from BIOS to Windows 7 in under four seconds.
It's definitely built for the money's-no-issue gamer, with a starting price of US$9,500, which includes lifetime 24/7 technical support and a similarly lengthy hardware warranty.
I imagine keeping this monster free of the dust and dirt that will inevitably get attracted to the exposed components will be a royal pain, but I suppose that loving care is what you're going to give it if you've parted with that amount of cash.
Via Bornrich
