FiringSquad Computex Invitational 2007! June 22, 2007 Brandon Sandman Bell

Introduction

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• The Ultimate Gaming Rig


• Best Video Performance


• Best CPU/Motherboard Performance


• Best Visual Design


• Best Portable Design


• Best Low Noise Design


• Highest Overclock

The Sponsors

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An event of this size wouldn’t be possible without our sponsors, who deserve our thanks for making it all possible:

EA

EA has made this event what it is from the very first year. Not only do they organize the gaming portion of the event, but they bring lots of prizes for the participants from the various companies, ensuring that everyone goes home with something.

This year, EA’s team organized a Command and Conquer 3 tournament to huge success. So successful in fact that it ended up taking way more time than we anticipated and we had to cal the match with 3 teams left. Otherwise, we would’ve been there all night, with no time to hand out the awards.

This year’s tournament was called by Sky Lin, and MCd by Henry Hsieh, Marketing Manager from EA Taiwan. Henry has been a great supporter of our tournament over the past few years, along with Jack Lin, general manager of EA Taiwan.

TCA

The Taipei Computer Association represents the Computer Industry in Taiwan and is one of the organizers of Computex. They bring a lot of the local Taiwan press to the event and have been our supporters since the very beginning. We appreciate having their support, as it means our event is officially sanctioned by the Computex organizers and brings us broader industry support. This support has allowed us to grow the event to its current size. Thanks to Enoch Du, Angie Tsai and Sakura Yang for their continued support of our event over the years.

Shuttle

As the company that invented the small form factor market back in 2001 with their SV24, Shuttle is highly respected among gamers and hardware enthusiasts. In many ways they’re the Apple of the industry, with stylish designs that are very powerful, delivering performance as good as any full-sized ATX system, yet small enough to fit comfortably on a small desk, or as the centerpiece of a home theater entertainment system. Particularly with their innovative heatpipe and cooling technologies, the Shuttle XPC is really a marvel of modern industrial design.

Synonymous with PC gaming, their XPC’s look cool and have been toted by gamers out to LAN parties for years, offering much of the same performance of a larger system without the bulk. Shuttle monitors are also suitable for LAN gamers, complete with handy carrying handle. This commitment to the small PC market has paid off for Shuttle-they are considered the industry leaders in SFF PC manufacturing. We have to thank Aaron Chen at Shuttle Taiwan for his effort in making this year’s sponsorship happen for Shuttle.

Razer

Gamers have long been familiar with Razer, a manufacturer of premium-quality PC peripherals, including mice, keyboards and mousepads. Their company motto is “Built for Gamers, By Gamers” which is an accurate reflection: their CEO Min-Liang Tan is an avid gamer and no doubt this spirit is instilled throughout the whole company. Razer is also a great supporter of LAN events world-wide. If you are into attending large LAN parties or are part of a clan, no doubt you are aware of Razer’s commitment to PC gaming. For the Industry Invitational, Razer provided all of the participants with Krait mice and Mantis gaming pads and also gave away Tarantula keyboards to some lucky winners.

Sponsors (cont’d)

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abit

abit has been a name synonymous to PC gamers since the very beginning of performance PC hardware. abit was the first to introduce and overclockable BIOS, the first to have jumperless technology, and the first to include overclocking strips on their motherboards. They also built the first legacy-free motherboard back in 2002, the original MAX series. And since 2003, they have had a close partnership with the worlds most famous gamer, Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel, who they kindly agreed to bring to our event this year! Fatal1ty is a great guy and played against any and all comers in a shootout; nobody beat him but someone did walk away with a F-190 HD Fatal1ty series motherboard from abit. Jason from TechwareLabs managed to get the most frags against him and was rewarded by being kicked over while still sitting in his chair, to Jonathan shouting “Fatal1ty!!”-a classic (yet totally staged) moment for the cameras. Once again we have to thank David Jarlstedt at abit for arranging this year’s sponsorship.

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Elsa

FiringSquad readers in North America may remember Elsa from a few years ago-it turns out they are back in the market. Long a manufacturer of high-end VGAs, their focus for the past few years has been parts of Asia and Europe. Elsa was once a very popular graphics card manufacturer and one of NVIDIA’s Tier One board partners. Elsa has fallen out of the limelight in the North American region in more recent years to focus on other markets -- it has been nearly six years since our last Elsa Gladiac review, back then it was their GeForce 3 card.

The company offers a range of GeForce cards, from the GeForce 7300 all the way up to the latest GeForce 8800 GPUs. It is good to hear that a company like Elsa is fighting to get back into the market-more competition is a good thing for gamers and the industry in general. Gloria Wu was instrumental making Elsa’s sponsorship happen this year.

Gigabyte

FiringSquad readers are no doubt familiar with Gigabyte-they are a titan in the motherboard industry. Gigabyte’s motherboards are known for being highly reliable as well as feature-packed: Gigabyte was the first motherboard manufacturer to offer dual BIOS chips on their motherboards as well as all-solid capacitors and their many of their high-end boards ship with 12-phase power circuitry and a host of other goodies including external eSATA ports that can be mounted on the backplate of the system. Their latest “6 Quad” series of motherboards feature quality touches such as all solid capacitors and 12-phase power, making their products unbelievably stable. Check out this recent review on FiringSquad for more info.

But motherboards aren’t the only area where Gigabyte excels. They also manufacture graphics cards, networking devices, notebook computers, cooling, and cases. In fact at last year’s invitational event a panel of judges awarded their case with the Best Visual Design Award.

Although quite busy with plenty of other events during Computex, they managed to pull off sponsorship and participation for which we are very grateful. We have to thank Tomas Lee in the US office and Jonathan Chen at the thermal division in Taiwan for their continued support.

Thermaltake

Founded in 1999, Thermaltake has enjoyed a meteoric rise to the top of the cooling and PC case markets. Thermaltake’s cases are practically legendary for their durability, their cases are also spacious enough that working inside them is quite easy. The product that really put Thermaltake on the map though is probably their Golden Orb CPU cooler.

The Golden Orb was the first heatsink/fan unit to forego the traditional square design in favor of its orb shape. At the very center of the orb was a powerful fan that did a remarkable job of keeping everything cool. The really sweet part about the Golden Orb though was its price – not only was the cooler quite effective at keeping CPUs cool, it was one of the most affordable aftermarket coolers on the market. This, combined with its size made it one of the most popular coolers of the Pentium III era: all of the FiringSquad editors had Golden Orb coolers in their personal systems back in those days.

Thermaltake has made huge strides in recent years, coming up with some unbelievably high-end products for PC enthusiasts. Some of their cases are amazingly complex designs, with features such as built in LCD screens and room for 2 motherboards. Their coolers are also impressive, featuring elaborate designs that are copied by many manufacturers in China for the Chinese market. Joseph Lin at Thermaltake Taiwan has long been a supporter of this event and we have to thank him for his participation once again, as well as Ramsom Koey in their US office.

Sponsors (cont’d)

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Biostar

Biostar really made a name for themselves with their iDEQ line of small form factor (SFF) systems. In our roundup of four 865G SFF systems, the iDEQ 200T came within a hair of winning our Bull’s Eye Award; in the article we declared the Biostar iDEQ 200T “offers the best ergonomics of all the small form factor systems we tested”.

In more recent months Biostar has been taking more steps to cater towards enthusiasts. Their latest Bearlake motherboard, the TP35D3-A7 Deluxe boasts such features as heat pipe, noiseless cooling, 8-phase power with all-solid capacitors, built-in power/reset switches, and BIOS features for overclocking. The board also supports DDR3 memory speeds up to 1333MHz and has a distinctive black PCB.

Their recent VGAs builds have also been excellent, with a lot of effort made towards high-end cooling for gaming.

Tomasz Swatowski in the Taiwan office is one of the more experienced marketing managers in Taiwan, and we owe him thanks for getting their sponsorship together.

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MSI

Like ASUS and Gigabyte, MSI is another one of Taiwan’s largest motherboard manufacturers. Also like ASUS and Gigabyte, MSI has their hands in almost everything PC-related, producing not just motherboards but also graphics cards, networking/communications products, consumer electronics devices like MP3/video players, flash memory drives, and also notebooks. In fact, many of MSI’s notebooks have been picked up by boutique gaming PC manufacturers like VoodooPC.

For Core 2 CPUs, MSI offers one of the most feature-packed nForce 680i SLI motherboards on the market with the P6N Diamond. The P6N Diamond is the only nForce 680i motherboard on the market with built-in Creative X-Fi Xtreme HD Audio. The P6N Diamond also has four PCI Express graphics slots, most nForce 680i motherboards only come with three of these slots.

We have to thank Jojo Chang and Vincent Lin who have long been a supporter of this event and FiringSquad in general.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA is no stranger to FiringSquad readers, having dominated the GPU market for most of the recent era of PC gaming. They are the undisputed graphics technology leader and the ones to beat in this department. They have also recently developed fantastic chipset designs that have also taken over the high-end market for motherboards. One of FiringSquad’s long-term partners, EVGA, happens to be NVIDIA’s largest partner in North America. We have to thank Cynthia Lee in Taiwan for her support.

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Coolermaster

For years now Cooler Master has been at the forefront of pioneering case design. It was Cooler Master who was one of the first case manufacturers to embrace the use of all-aluminum enclosures. By moving from steel to aluminum thermals are improved and the case weighs less. Cooler Master went on to produce several aluminum cases that were highly popular among enthusiasts. More recently Cooler Master has moved into other areas such as CPU coolers, hard disk enclosures, and notebook coolers. At Computex 2007, Cooler Master showcased another segment they’re entering: power supplies.

Another favorite of PC enthusiasts, Coolermaster has recently come out with a line of Fatal1ty products for gamers and enthusiasts. This marks a bigger push by Coolermaster towards a more visible presence in the market and is certainly welcomed. We have to thank Cathy Huang at Coolermaster Taiwan for her support of this event.

The Contestants

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Albatron

While Albatron has only been in the motherboard business for about five years now, they’ve quickly made a name for themselves in the industry. Besides motherboards, Albatron also manufactures graphics cards (they’ve been an NVIDIA board partner since 2002), plasma and LCD displays, and more recently, flash memory.

Albatron went all-out with their invitational system last year, submitting a Quad SLI behemoth sporting two GeForce 7900 GX2 cards. The system was perhaps a little too bleeding edge though as the 7900 GX2 graphics driver at the time was still a little rough around the edges. For this year’s event Albatron played it a little more conservative, opting to go with their 7950GT-512 HDCP, which is based on NVIDIA’s trusty GeForce 7950 GT GPU.

The 7950 GT is one of NVIDIA’s fastest DX9 GPUs, but a generation behind today’s latest cards. Albatron then paired the 7950 GT with their K8SLI-AM2 motherboard. This is an nForce 4 SLI motherboard that has been updated to support AMD’s AM2 socket.

To finish the system off, Albatron outfitted the system with an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ CPU.

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ASUS

Without a doubt ASUS is one of the most recognized brands in the motherboard industry. With multiple products spanning across chipsets from Intel, NVIDIA, SiS, and VIA, ASUS’ motherboards have appealed to a wide audience ranging from budget shoppers to gamers and enthusiasts that are willing to spend anything in order to achieve the highest performance. It’s the high-end performance crowd that would really appreciate ASUS’ entry into this year’s invitational.

At the heart of the system was an ASUS Blitz Extreme motherboard. Based on Intel’s P35 Bearlake chipset, the Blitz Extreme is the first motherboard to support water-cooling out-of-the-box. On top of the North Bridge of the chipset sits a water block, which is combined with heat pipes on the South Bridge and power circuitry to deliver the ultimate in cooling performance. The Blitz Extreme also supports an interesting feature dubbed Crosslinx which is designed to allow x8 operation for both PCI Express graphics (PEG) slots when running in CrossFire mode. If you recall, the P35 chipset natively supports CrossFire, but can’t split the PCIe lanes evenly among the PEG slots. This hampers performance.

Crosslinx is designed to get around this, although we haven’t had a chance to test it out ourselves just yet.

The Blitz Extreme uses DDR3 memory and ships with a copy of STALKER and 3DMark 06.

Besides the Blitz Extreme motherboard, the ASUS system was also equipped with a 1333MHz FSB Core 2 E6850 running overclocked to 3.24GHz. This was achieved by running the FSB at 540MHz; that’s over 200MHz above the stock 333MHz FSB supported by the CPU. The CPU’s clock multiplier was set at 6.0. ASUS then paired this with 1GB of DDR3 memory running at 648MHz and a pair of Radeon HD 2900 XT cards running in CrossFire mode.

ASUS also entered their C90 upgradeable notebook. The C90 is a barebones notebook that’s designed to be upgradeable. The idea is to make certain key components easily accessible so they can be easily installed and even upgraded over time. The system is built around an ASUS 945G chipset motherboard and ships with a 15.4” WSXGA+(1680x1050) LCD display. The end user then drops in the CPU, GPU, hard disk drive, and RAM. The notebook supports NVIDIA’s MXM interface, so any GPU compliant with MXM can be used, while Core 2 CPUs up to the Core 2 Extreme X6800 (note this is a desktop CPU) are also supported. The system was configured with a Core 2 E6400, 2GB RAM, and GeForce 8600M GT GPU.

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Biostar

The TP35D3-A7 Deluxe was the motherboard of choice for Biostar’s invitational event system. Running alongside the TP35D3-A7 Deluxe was a Core 2 Duo E6750 running at 1333MHz FSB and 2GB of DDR3-1066MHz RAM.

For handling graphics duties, Biostar opted to include one of their V8603TS51 GeForce 8600 GTS graphics cards. This card runs at the stock GeForce 8600 GTS speeds of 675MHz core/2000MHz memory and is equipped with 512MB of memory.

Contestant Systems (cont’d)

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For this year’s invitational event, Cooler Master put together a very nice system. Obviously being a system from Cooler Master, we couldn’t help but notice the Cosmos case. Cosmos is Cooler Master’s flagship chassis being launched in August, it supports conventional air cooling as well as liquid cooling. Cooler Master has designed the case to generate very little noise – it even ships with sound-insulating foam – and features 120mm case fans for intake and exhaust. In fact Cooler Master says the case generates negative air pressure (there are two exhaust fans on the top of the case and one on the back).

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DFI

Just a few short years ago practically zero hardware enthusiasts were interested in DFI motherboards. Instead DFI was known for producing low-cost, low performing motherboards for the value segment – overclocking was never considered in motherboard design. Nowadays DFI is one of the most respected names in the business among enthusiasts. The company owes its stratospheric success to their engineers, most of who came from abit and designed some of abit’s most successful motherboards.

DFI’s LANPARTY line is what started it all. The LANPARTY series is DFI’s flagship motherboard brand. These boards are designed to deliver extreme performance with high levels of overclocking and are highly tweakable.

For their invitational system DFI elected to use their LANParty UT ICFX3200 T2R motherboard. This motherboard is based around ATI’s RD600 chipset for Intel CPUs and supports CrossFire multiGPU technology. The chipset has earned a reputation for reaching high FSB speeds and is cooled passively with simple heatsinks, no fan is required for the North Bridge or South Bridge of the chipset. Running with the LANParty UT ICFX3200 T2R was a Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU.

To improve performance, DFI ran the FSB at 430MHz, this overclocked the CPU to 3.01GHz, an improvement of over 1.0GHz over the E6300’s stock speed of 1.86GHz. DFI then finished the system off with a Radeon X1900 XT.

With such a highly overclocked system, you can probably guess what award DFI was shooting for…

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Elsa

Elsa’s invitational system was very nice. The system consisted of a pair of Elsa Gladiac GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB cards running in SLI. With two GeForce 8800 cards running together, the Elsa system tore through our performance benchmarks. Paired with the cards was a Core 2 E6850 running at 1333MHz FSB and 3.0GHz clock speed. Elsa then finished the system off with a DFI LANPARTY UT NF680i SLI motherboard and 2GB of RAM. Elsa then finished the system off with a Wolf King keyboard – obviously they came prepared to play C&C 3!

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Gigabyte

For this year’s invitational event Gigabyte came with a very powerful system. At the heart of Gigabyte’s PC was their GA-N680 SLI-DQ6 motherboard. The GA-N680 SLI-DQ6 is Gigabyte’s high-end nForce 680i SLI motherboard, featuring Gigabyte’s quad BIOS technology, quad Gigabit Ethernet, three PCI Express graphics slots, and Gigabyte’s Silent Pipe heat pipe with Crazy Cool to help cool the underside of the motherboard. Like many of Gigabyte’s newer motherboards, it also features all-solid capacitors and 12-phase power. CPU duties were handled by a Core 2 Extreme X6800 and 4GB of RAM.

For graphics duties, Gigabyte finished the system off with two of their GV-NX88S640H-RH GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB cards running in SLI.

Contestants (cont’d)

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One of the most well known names in the memory business is Kingston. Kingston memory modules can be found in a wide variety of systems, OEMs like Dell and HP use their memory modules in their desktop and notebook computers, while Kingston’s memory modules are also popular among the do-it-yourself (DIY) crowd as well. Here Kingston offers a wide range of memory modules, ranging from their ValueRAM modules on the low-end, up to a wide variety of HyperX modules on the high-end that are specifically engineered and tested to run at higher speeds and with lower timings.

A perfect example of this is Kingston’s 1375MHz DDR3 HyperX modules (PC3-11000), the KHX11000D3LLK2/2G 2GB kit. The kit combines two 1GB modules and is rated for speeds up to 1375MHz with memory timings of 7-7-7-20 at 1.7V.

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MSI

MSI chose to bring an AMD system to this year’s invitational event. MSI’s PC featured one of their K9N SLI Platinum motherboards. The K9N SLI Platinum uses the nForce 570 SLI chipset and ships with dual Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel audio, and dual x8 PCI Express graphics slots. MSI then paired the K9N SLI Platinum with an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ and one of their NX8600 GTS GeForce 8600 GTS graphics cards.

To showcase the power of their recently launched gaming notebooks, MSI also brought their 17” GX710 notebook to the invitational. The GX710 supports the latest Core 2 and Turion 64 CPUs, while graphics GPUs supported include the GeForce 8600 line and Radeon HD Mobility 2600 (as you’d expect, the Radeon GPUs are only available with AMD CPUs, and the GeForce GPUs can only be configured with Core 2 processors). MSI’s notebook featured a Core 2 Duo T7500@ 2.2GHz, 2GB RAM, and GeForce 8600MGT graphics.

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NVIDIA

While NVIDIA’s dropped by our event to play games every year, normally they show up the day of the event, setup their systems, and get their game on. This was the first year they also decided to enter a system into the actual hardware competition and they certainly showed up with one helluva system.

Visually NVIDIA’s system was impressive, with a Cooler Master CM Stacker NVIDIA Edition chassis and two GeForce 8800 Ultra GPUs running alongside each other in SLI.

As you probably know by now, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is the fastest GPU on the market, featuring a core clock speed of 612MHz, while the GPU’s stream processors run at 1.5GHz. Like the GeForce 8800 GTX, the GeForce 8800 Ultra ships with 768MB of memory, only in the case of the Ultra the memory runs at 1.08GHz, delivering over 100GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth to the GPU.

NVIDIA chose to equip their system with EVGA’s nForce 680i SLI motherboard, which was then paired with a Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU running at the stock speed of 2.67GHz, and 4GBof memory. The system was running Windows Vista under an older ForceWare driver set, so while the paper specs of the system were impressive, its performance wasn’t quite as high as some of the other systems in our 3D benchmarks.

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PowerColor

PowerColor specializes in manufacturing high-end Radeon graphics cards for enthusiasts. For instance, they have a line of silent graphics cards dubbed SCS3 (short for Silent Cooling Series) which use massive heat pipes in order to cool the GPU without generating any noise. They’ve also partnered with Arctic Cooling to produce Radeon cards with built-in Arctic Cooling Accelero heatsink/fan units integrated on the card. The Accelero is considered to be one of the best aftermarket heatsink/fan units on the market right now, so this gives end users a very powerful cooling solution.

PowerColor is actually one of ATI’s oldest board partners, with products dating all the way back to the Rage 128, and they also offer a range of multimedia products including USB-based TV tuners, and of course, TV Wonder products.

PowerColor came to the invitational with a very powerful system centered around a pair of their Radeon HD 2900 XT cards running in CrossFire mode. They then partnered with DFI to produce a highly overclocked Core 2 system that delivered exceptional performance in our benchmarks.

Powered by DFI’s LANParty UT ICFX3200 T2R motherboard, PowerColor’s system consisted of a quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6800 processor overclocked to run at 3.67GHz. This is the highest clock speed of any system entered into the invitational event. PowerColor then finished the system off with 2GB of RAM.

The contestants (cont’d)

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Sapphire’s Ultimate Edition cards traditionally use heat pipe cooling technology to keep the GPU cool. Here Sapphire has partnered with both Arctic Cooling and Zalman in the past, using heat pipe coolers from both manufacturers on various GPUs.

Sapphire’s latest flagship card is the Radeon HD 2900 XT Toxic. The cooling system for the 2900 HD Toxic is centered around a 5.25” drive bay which houses the reservoir, radiator and pump, which is then connected to a water block on the top of the Radeon HD 2900 XT GPU. Water circulates back and forth via two hoses, working to keep the GPU cool. One interesting feature that the Toxic supports is the ability to add an additional Toxic GPU if you want to run two cards in CrossFire mode.

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Shuttle

Over the years many competitors have come and gone, but no company has truly displaced Shuttle as the #1 manufacturer of small form factor systems.

To illustrate just how much power their systems are capable of delivering, Shuttle submitted a very high-end PC. At the heart of the system was their SD39P2 SFF chassis. The SD39P2 uses Intel’s 975X chipset and supports the latest quad-core CPUs. In fact, sitting within the SD39P2 was a Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU running at 2.4GHz.

But the quad-core CPU wasn’t the only high-end product sitting within Shuttle’s SD39P2 chassis. On top of that, Shuttle also included a GeForce 8800 GTX card! The GeForce 8800 GTX is one of the most powerful video cards on the market right now, and consumes a lot of power.

The fact that Shuttle was able to run this card in tandem with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 demonstrates just how capable these systems are. This toaster-sized PC was faster than many of the other full-sized systems that were submitted this year!

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Thermaltake

For the invitational Thermaltake submitted a system with their latest case, known as the Swordsman (it’s also known as the SwordM). Like all of Thermaltake’s high-end cases, the SwordM is a tool-free design and supports liquid-cooling systems, in fact Thermaltake’s system was liquid cooled. One interesting feature that the SwordM supports is a shutter enclosure in the back of the case. Cables can be tucked out of sight inside the enclosure, resulting in a neater looking case and better airflow. To further expel hot air from the system, the top can be opened. As you know, hot air usually rises to the top of the case, with its convertible top, the SwordM could be quite effective at removing this hot air from within the system. Another interesting aspect of the top is it is opened by a hydraulics, in fact the side of the case can also be opened hydraulically.

To make it easier to transport, Thermaltake has integrated handles on the top of the SwordM, and the case can be mounted on wheels as well. The case also has built in front panel ports for audio, USB, Firewire, and eSATA as well. Finally, the SwordM can be outfitted with a 7” motorized LCD touch screen. The screen can be retracted when not in use and supports a resolution of 1280x760.

Besides the SwordM case, Thermaltake’s system was also equipped with a Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU running at 2.93GHz and two GeForce 8800 GTS cards running in SLI.

Thermaltake submitted a second system as well. The second system used their Lanbox SFF chassis, which was a bit hit with our guest judges, an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ with Radeon X1950 XT graphics, and 1GB of RAM.

The Winners

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Ultimate Gaming System: PowerColor
Thanks to its quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6800 CPU running at 3.67GHz and Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire graphics, PowerColor’s system turned in the highest performance in our 3D and CPU/motherboard benchmarks. No other system quite matched it in overall combination of performance. This really is a tribute to not only the components used within the system, but just as importantly, the amount of time PowerColor devoted in tweaking the system for maximum performance.

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Conclusion

So that does it for this year’s invitational event. With Computex moving to a new location next year, we’re not sure where next year’s event will take place, but based on the large crowd this year we have no doubt we’ll be back again in 2008. Each year the invitational seems to get bigger and better with free EA games for everyone, door prizes, T-shirts, and other cool swag. Thanks again to all our participants, guest judges, and sponsors for making the FiringSquad Invitational at Computex 2007 so successful!