The GPG X2
GamePC comes from old money; it's a subsidiary of Solid Electric, a major distributor of SCSI cables and connectors that bas been around since 1985. Solid Electric launched GamePC five years ago, and since then the company has supplied a diverse group of power users which includes the likes of Blizzard Entertainment, Lockheed Martin, and Stanford's medical school.
 It's almost monolithic, isn't it? |
Whatever you choose, it will come all wrapped up in a massive Enlight case that looks downright menacing. The stealthy black case is an attractive and undeniably cooler alternative to a standard beige case, and black CD-RW and floppy drives blend in nicely with the aesthetic when you open the case's drive bay door.
GamePC credits Enlight for the case, but it's identical to what you'll find from Chenbro, Antec, and others—they're all rebadging the same thing. If you can't beat 'em, rebadge 'em. Whoever builds this case isn't skimping—you get drive rails, loads of room inside for fans and drives, and even locking doors. About the only thing missing is front-panel access to USB and peripheral ports, which even cheap cases now feature.
Our review sample was decked out with two of AMD's Athlon MP 2100+ processors, but you can customize the processors just like everything else.
SMP makes a lot of sense for power users, especially considering the relatively low price premium you pay to pair up a couple of Athlon MPs. There's just something about the buttery smoothness of an SMP system that makes me swoon, and I don't even use that many SMP-aware applications. I'm still on the lookout for a benchmark that does this buttery smoothness justice, but I'm not sure one can even measure such a quality. It's sort of like trying to quantify why Quake III Arena's controls feel more responsive than Unreal Tournament's, and if you raise the topic in the right circles, you'll probably get a vicious a debate between SMP and single-processor users.
Two CPUs really are twice the fun
Mo' memory
Workstations generally deal with huge files that can be cumbersome to work with off a hard drive. To combat this bottleneck, GamePC loaded our GPG X2 with two 512MB registered ECC PC2100 DDR SDRAM DIMMs. AMD's 760MPX chipset doesn't officially support a memory bus faster than 133MHz, so there's really no need for faster memory.
GamePC packs in expansion cards
The Asus A7M266-D mobo has five PCI slots and one AGP Pro slot. The GPG X2 leaves only one slot bare. As far as add-in cards go, you can mix and match things to your heart's desire with a custom system.
In our review system, 3Ware's 7210 2-port RAID controller is nestled next to the Quadro4 750XGL graphics card. Beside that, you have Creative's SB Live! 5.1 sound card and then Asus' 4-port USB 2.0 PCI card. Networking is handled by the motherboard's 3Com Ethernet chip, but you use up a PCI slot to get the RJ-45 header.
The Quadro4 750XGL deserves a little special attention because it's our first Quadro here at TR. Quadros are NVIDIA's workstation graphics chips, and the Quadro4 is essentially a GeForce4 Titanium with an extra line antialiasing engine and different drivers. Everything else is largely the same, right down to the 128MB of BGA DDR SDRAM and nView multimonitor support.
If you can't order a specific component with your GamePC system that you absolutely must have, you can buy it yourself and actually send it to GamePC to be installed. There's a small fee for the installation, but the option is there if you want to avoid opening up the case.
All the bare essentials included
Don't expect much in the way of supplemental material from GamePC. All you'll get is a box full of manuals and extra components for whatever's in your system. Not that you need more, but a CD-ROM with an image of the initial OS and driver installation would have been nice. I'm really anal about my data, and I'll admit that RAID 0 makes me nervous. One of the benefits of buying a GamePC system is that they can install the OS for you, drivers and all. In the unlikely event of a system crash, it would sure be nice to easily restore the system to its shipping condition.
