IBuyPower Gamer SLI Special Edition - Athlon 64 4000+ 2.4 GHz - 19 TFT review: IBuyPower Gamer SLI Special Edition - Athlon 64 4000+ 2.4 GHz - 19 TFT

iBuyPower Gamer-SLI Special Edition
Editor's note: We have changed the ratings in this review to reflect recent changes in our rating scale. Find out more here.
We're starting to see more and more high-end systems equipped with two video cards running in Nvidia's SLI (scalable link interface) mode for enhanced 3D performance. Believe it or not, the $3,295 iBuyPower Gamer-SLI Special Edition takes another unique approach: it's the first system we've seen that uses a single graphics card with two graphics chips on it. Engineered by motherboard manufacturer Gigabyte Technology, the GV-3D1 graphics controller contains two Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT GPUs (graphic processing units) on a single 3D card. While this design is certainly innovative, it comes with some caveats.

For one, the card requires an SLI-enabled motherboard. Secondly, Gigabyte does not recommend using the GV-3D1 on a non-Gigabyte motherboard. In fact, the card is not sold separately and is currently available only at retail as a bundle with Gigabyte's K8NXP-SLI motherboard. (According to Gigabyte, the card may be sold separately in the future, depending on demand.) In this system, though, Gigabyte's hardware makes for a highly capable gaming PC that costs more than most people would probably spend on a computer, but it won't require you to take out a second mortgage on your house (for reference, check out the nearly $7,000 Voodoo Omen).

iBuyPower offers multiple case choices for the Gamer-SLI. Our review system came housed in an NZXT Trinity midtower chassis with a black finish, offset by a black-chrome front panel and the requisite blue cathode lighting and multicolored fan LEDs. While the black-on-black color scheme gives the Gamer-SLI a sleek appearance, the finish scratches easily. You'll have to keep a polishing rag handy as every dust particle and handprint sticks out glaringly from the shiny black case. A blue backlit temperature gauge adorns the lower-front grille, and the clear side panel is trimmed in silver chrome. A peek through the side panel reveals a jumble of cables loosely tie-wrapped and pushed off to one side--clearly not a Voodoo- or Alienware-caliber cable-routing job.

The chassis houses five 5.25-inch external drive bays, three of which are occupied (by a multiformat DVD burner, a DVD-ROM drive, and a 6-in-1 media drive), and two of the four hard drive bays are filled. All drive bays are tool-less, and since the hard drive bays are perpendicularly mounted, you can install and remove drives with ease.

External connectivity ports are plentiful--a total of eight USB 2.0 ports (two up front, two on a daughtercard, and four integrated) and three FireWire ports (two on the same daughtercard and one on the sound card) join dual Gigabit Ethernet connections and a wireless 802.11g PCI card with a removable antenna. You also get jacks for onboard eight-channel audio, including S/PDIF in and out jacks for coaxial digital audio, even though the Gamer-SLI comes with Creative's eight-channel Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS sound card. In addition to two x1 PCIe slots (one of which is crowded by the video card's cooling fans), there's an open x16 PCIe slot, which immediately had us wondering if we could add yet another dual-core card to the machine. Unfortunately, the Nvidia drivers and chipset do not support a quad-core video configuration, nor does Gigabyte's card come with the requisite row of pins to receive the SLI connector bracket. With two 80mm cooling fans and two power-supply fans spinning away, the Gamer-SLI is a tad on the noisy side but not so bad that it would ruin a movie or a game.

Our iBuyPower Gamer-SLI Special Edition arrived with a speedy AMD Athlon 64 4000+ processor running at 2.41GHz and a plentiful 1GB of 400MHz Corsair 3200XL Pro DDR memory running on the Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI motherboard. A pair of Western Digital 250GB Serial ATA drives (7,200rpm) in a RAID 0 configuration provides plenty of storage, and with a double-layer, multiformat DVD burner; a standalone DVD-ROM drive; and a 6-in-1 media-card reader, this system lets you take advantage of nearly all removable media formats.

The included 19-inch ViewSonic VP191B LCD monitor had no trouble keeping up with the graphics card, maintaining a crisp image with no noticeable pixelation or stuttering during gameplay or DVD playback. A set of Logitech's excellent Z-5500 Digital speakers delivers booming THX-certified 5.1 digital surround sound. To top it all off, the Gamer-SLI also comes with Logitech's LX700 Cordless Desktop set, which includes a wireless multimedia keyboard and an optical scroll mouse. In addition to Windows XP Professional, you get an OEM version of the Nero Burning Rom 6.0 disc-burning software, plus CyberLink's Power DVD 5.0 for watching DVDs, and NovaLogic's Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising game.

On our 3D gaming benchmarks, the iBuyPower Gamer-SLI led all other SLI-based systems on our Half-Life 2 tests, with a score of 36.6fps on our 1,600x1,200-resolution test, but its score of 76.9fps on the 1,024x768-resolution portion of the test didn't impress us. That score is definitely playable, but it wasn't as "through the roof" as we had predicted. In comparison, the Alienware Aurora ALX SLI scored a 30.2fps on the 1,600x1,200 tests and a 112.5fps on the 1,024x768 tests. If the iBuyPower's 1,600x1,200 scores seem inappropriately high compared to the true SLI systems' results, we suspect the discrepancy has something to do with the fact that the other systems used Asus's A8N-SLI motherboard, the very first motherboard with SLI support. iBuyPower's Gamer-SLI, on the other hand, uses Gigabyte's newer board and newer graphics drivers. As SLI drivers and the supporting hardware mature, we expect to see the scores improve--and these scores bear out that prediction.

The Gamer-SLI's results on our SysMark tests were unimpressive. The Gamer-SLI placed last on our Internet-content-creation and office-productivity test suites, but the competition here is remarkably strong. Although it finished last, the iBuyPower's AMD CPU and its 1GB of memory will still handle day-to-day computing easily, and their 64-bit processing will come in handy should you decide to upgrade to Microsoft's forthcoming 64-bit operating system later this year.

iBuyPower's warranty policy is generous for a smaller vendor. It covers the Gamer-SLI parts for one year and labor for an uncommon three years. You also get one year of onsite service, limited to two visits. Additional onsite calls cost $165 per hour and must be prepaid. Telephone support is toll-free and is available Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. PT. Although iBuyPower's Web site has a link to a technical-support page, it was unavailable during several visits to the site. You get a few component manuals in the box but no all-encompassing system documentation.

To measure application performance, CNET Labs uses BAPCo's SysMark 2004, an industry-standard benchmark. Using off-the-shelf applications, SysMark measures a desktop's performance using office-productivity applications (such as Microsoft Office and McAfee VirusScan) and Internet-content-creation applications (such as Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver).

Valve Software's Half-Life 2 showcases some of the latest in DirectX 9.0 image quality, accompanied by tremendous GPU taxation. Those factors, and its vast popularity among PC gamers, make it an ideal game to test a desktop's 3D capabilities. Using a demo file created in our Labs that incorporates all of the game's taxing features, Half-Life 2 gives us a great indication of how a PC will handle today's most challenging 3D games. Our custom demo is set in the canal level and encompasses advanced effects, such as light from the flashlight as well as water effects. We make sure to update Half-Life 2 with the latest patches before we start testing. Depending on the type of system being tested, we perform two runs of the demos at a resolution of 1,024x768 for lower-end desktops, then an additional two runs each of 1,280x1,024-resolution and 1,600x1,200-resolution tests for high-end systems. We configure the display settings via the game's own options screens, not the Windows graphics driver settings, and within the game, antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are set to 4X and 8X for all resolutions.

System configurations:
ABS Ultimate M6
Windows XP Professional SP2; 2.6GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-55; Nvidia Nforce4 Ultra SLI chipset; 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB (2) Nvidia GeForce 6800GT (PCIe, SLI); two Seagate ST3200822AS 200GB 7,200rpm, Serial ATA; integrated Silicon SiI 3114 SoftRAID 5 controller
Alienware Aurora ALX SLI
Windows XP Professional SP2; 2.6GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-55; Nvidia Nforce4 Ultra SLI chipset; 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB (2) Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra (PCIe, SLI); two WDC WD740GD-00FLX0 74GB 10,000rpm Serial ATA; integrated Nvidia Nforce RAID class controller
iBuyPower Gamer-SLI Special Edition
Windows XP Professional SP2; 2.4GHz AMD Athlon 64 4000+; Nvidia Nforce4 Ultra SLI chipset; 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6600GT (PCIe, SLI, Dual GPU); two WDC WD2500JD-98HBB0 250GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA; integrated Silicon SiI 3114 SoftRAID 5 controller
Velocity Micro Gamer's Edge Dual X
Windows XP Professional SP2; 2.6GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-55; Nvidia Nforce4 Ultra SLI chipset; 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB (2) Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra (PCIe, SLI); two WDC WD740GD-00FLX0 74GB 10,000rpm Serial ATA; WDC WD2500JD-50HBB0 250GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA; integrated Silicon SiI 3114 SoftRAID 5 controller
Voodoo Omen
Windows XP Professional SP2; 2.6GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-55; Nvidia Nforce4 Ultra SLI chipset; 2,048MB DDR SDRAM 500MHz; 256MB (2) Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra (PCIe, SLI); two Seagate ST3160827AS 160GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA ; integrated Nvidia Nforce RAID class controller

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