The iBuypower Gamer 942IL
We looked to the iBuypower site to find the 942IL, and to our surprise it wasn’t there — either that, or it was just well-hidden. This is the same thing that happened when we reviewed the Gamer Mage 855 system from them at the beginning of 2008; back then we were told that the system could be built with the online configurator, and it would be offered at the promised price at a later date.
Using the online configurator on the iBuypower site, we recreated the Gamer 942IL system for $4,042; iBuypower gave us a spec sheet showing the MSRP of the Gamer 942IL as $3599, so when it’s released it appears it will be a deal compared to custom pricing. It’s still nice to see that, should you wish to do so, iBuypower will make you pretty much anything you want from their parts bin, as long as you’re willing to pay for it.
iBuypower chose to build this particular system around an EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 quad core processor. This processor represents pretty much the fastest you can get right now: four cores and 12 MB of cache all running at 3.2 GHz. This processor has it where it counts, and should be the hot knife cutting through your applications’ butter.
In theory, the best SLI configuration would be made up of two 9800 GX2 cards with four GPUs in total; iBuypower went a small step down from this lofty perch, including two 9800 GTX cards with “only” two GPUs included. However, these cards are no slouch by any means.
GDDR3 RAM is as fast as it gets, usable only with a few choice enthusiast class chipsets, and the 790i is one of them. iBuypower decided to include a full 4 GB of RAM with the 942IL, a bit more than 32-bit Vista can actually use, but the pairing of two 2GB sticks allows the RAM to run in the fast dual-channel configuration.
To recap so far, this system is using the fastest CPU and RAM available paired with some of the fastest video cards available, linked together in an SLI configuration. Looking good!
The included hard drives are two 500 GB units configured in a RAID 0 array, which allows for faster disk reads and writes, but no data redundancy.
The system is powered by a hefty Tuniq 950 watt supply, which, along with a 20x DVD writer and a 16x DVD-ROM, fit within a stylish Thermaltake Xazer-VI MX gaming case. Also included are a Logitech keyboard and mouse.
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The Sysmark 2007 3D test on page 4 is againgst a dell XPS?
Bear in mind a skilled OCer can achieve results fairly close to the Reactor at a fraction of the price; not possible with the iBuyPower which uses much more expensive components to achieve a similar result. Not too flattering if you think about it, but that's the power of the OC for you!