Maingear Prelude (AMD Phenom X4 9850) review: Maingear Prelude (AMD Phenom X4 9850)

Maingear's AMD midrange Prelude desktop clearly has the Dell XPS 630 in its sights. The Prelude is faster almost across the board and at $1,499 it's less expensive. Our only reservation is with its interior. The Prelude case is very attractive on the outside, but to achieve its unique, squat dimensions, Maingear had to do some creative component arranging, which results in a few extra steps for upgraders. If you don't see yourself playing with the hardware much and you're looking for a midrange gaming desktop, the Prelude is one of the best on the market right now for sheer bang for the buck. Upgraders shouldn't have too big a problem, either, as long as they're willing to accept a few minor inconveniences.

This is actually not the first time we've seen a PC with this kind of interior. Voodoo PC's Hexx from 2004 was actually worse. In that system, Voodoo put the power supply in front of the expansion slots, which meant an awkward removal process. The Prelude puts the system fan in front of the expansion slots, and the power supply in front of the CPU socket. Thankfully, the system fan is actually not that hard to take out. Simply remove four thumbscrews from the back panel and unplug the power connection and it comes right out.

The power supply is potentially a bigger issue. It's easy enough to move out of the way (remove four screws) if you want to upgrade the processor, but because it sits directly in front of the CPU socket, you can't use some of those larger CPU cooling fans and heat sinks. As we said, for anyone looking for a fast, externally attractive gaming desktop, the unique hardware arrangement is not a huge issue, but if you're shopping for a system that you might want to overhaul completely down the road, this is probably not the system for you.

From a value standpoint, the Prelude might be the best desktop on the market right now. We awarded the Dell XPS 630 an Editors' Choice award largely because of its fast performance and its value proposition, and the Prelude has better features and performance for roughly the same price.

You can see on our comparison chart that the two are almost identical. The Maingear's chief advantage is that its graphics cards have more memory. The enthusiast-class AMD 790X chipset may have something to do with its faster performance as well. Maingear also offers more configuration options than the Dell, including CPUs from AMD and Intel and GPUs from AMD and Nvidia, as well as 64-bit Windows Vista, which gives your systems a higher RAM limit. We should add that although the Maingear seems $100 less in our comparison chart, the XPS 630 came with a Dell mouse and keyboard. The Maingear came with no input devices, although adding the two lowest end options bumps the price up by $45. Even then, the Prelude is still less expensive than the XPS 630, and as you'll see from our benchmarks, it's also faster on almost every test.

You should also consider the $1,499 Falcon Northwest FragBox 2 as a direct competitor to the Prelude and the XPS 630. The three of them trade wins on our application tests, and the Maingear scores right where we expect it to. Its trouncing on iTunes by the FragBox 2 is likely because of the FragBox 2's overclocked processor. Maingear won't overclock the Prelude, but its quad-core Phenom X4 9850 processor is one of AMD's "Black Edition" models, which have an unlocked CPU clock speed multiplier. Thus, and as with the XPS 630, you can overclock the Prelude yourself and likely gain more performance.