The one thing you notice about the Juggernaut is how quiet it is. It’s not silent by any means, but considering the hardware and the number of fans inside it, its low noise level is still very impressive.
So far so good, but what about the graphics performance? In keeping with the rest of the internals, the graphics performance is top notch. In fact, the graphics card is the first thing that catches you eye when you open the case’s side panel - it's massive.
Sitting in the primary x16 PCIe slot is an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 dual-chip graphics card with each of the cores clocked at 600MHz. Th 1GB of GDDR 3 memory runs at 1GHz - effictively 2GHz since it's double-data rate memory. Futuremark’s demanding 3DMark06 benchmark yields a score of 18,825.
Helping the gaming experience is an Eclipse 2 gaming keyboard
Tested with a real life game, in this case World in Conflict's built in benchmark, the Fusion Juggernaut produced an average frame rate score of 65f/s when tested at a 1280 x 1024 resolution with all in-game details set to high.
Now, this is all well and good. But if you ever want to upgrade the graphics, you face a bit of a dilemma. While the Juggarnaut comes with a single Nvidia card, if you wanted to go down the multi-card route you’ll have to ditch the Nvidia board as the motherboard only supports AMD’s CrossFire technology, not Nvidia's equivalent, SLI. You're also limited to just two AMD graphics cards, not three or four.
COMMENTS
Comparisons
The text seems to suggest this is fastest machine reviewed to date, but the Alienware Area 51 ALX scores better results across the board. That review compares it with the Mesh Q8, please can we always have closest equivalent system's figures shown on any performance graph, as otherwise its just a bunch of fairly meaningless numbers.
Re: Re: FSB
Specified by Intel for 200-400MHz, sure... but then Asus have always ignored such trival matters.
I have this case myself as the basis for my home-built. Lovely thing, except that because the whole thing is porous, the sound containment isn't the best, and airflow isn't quite as controllable as it could be. Dust is also a bit of an issue. It looks better than you think though... nice black block, quite sleek-looking and understated. I don't want something that looks like it came from the set of Dr. Who. Also very cheap for what it is.
Not a bad price, no... depends on the warranty care though, otherwise may as well build yourself.
FSB?
Maybe I'm being a divvy, but why do you need a cpu with an FSB speed of 1333 MHz when your mobo can only tackle up to 800 MHz?
And surely half the fun of overclocked gear is building / breaking and overclocking it your self?
HDD cache helping transfer large files?
If you are transferring a file larger than 32MB, I'd have thought the cache would be useless, better to stream straight through. The cache is there because often the data you want is the same as you got before, or very close to it. If you are reading a lot of small files all the time, or at least the same blocks, better to keep them in a buffer of fast memory and read that fast buffer instead of the relatively slow HDD.
