Digital Trends

AVA Direct Gaming PC Workstation September 15th, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Gaming Performance

AVADirect built this machine without many hardware compromises under the hood, so when we sat down to fire up a few games with it, we expected corresponding performance. Not surprisingly, it delivered in almost every respect. 

The main mountain for any watt-suckling gaming PC to climb these days seems to be Crysis, a game famous for breaking even the mightiest of rigs with its absurd system demands. Naturally, we used it to push our system as far as it could go.

Initial results with the default system settings for the game looked promising. The system produced smooth frame rates and no hiccups in performance, regardless of what was going on onscreen. But without anti-aliasing, high texture settings, or even full resolution on our 1680 x 1050 monitor, we wanted more, so we began to tick boxes and slide sliders. We were able to crank every feature to high and anti-aliasing to 4X before the system began to shudder. Putting all settings to “very high,” or anti-aliasing to 8X, slowed it to an unplayable chug. Fortunately, the improved graphics were barely noticeable, and we felt more than satisfied with the settings that produced a playable frame rate – it looked nearly cinematic in quality.

In less demanding games, like BioShock and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, the PC allowed us to slide every setting to maximum without so much as flinching. Framerates remained sky high even as enemies and explosions piled up on screen, and we could take in all the graphical niceties the games had to offer without worrying about whipping the mouse around and getting the inevitable judder. It was, in two words, gaming nirvana.

The front of the system

Windows Performance

Imagine a system that truly works at the exact same speed you do: think about opening a window and it’s there almost as fast as you can double-click on it. That about summarizes the experience of working with our AVADirect machine, which – with a total of eight cores humming along inside and 16GB of RAM – has to be the most utterly capable multi-tasker we’ve ever had the pleasure of using.

As the only real-world test of Windows we could devise to possibly snag such a capable machine, we opened the start menu and started launching everything. Amazingly enough, it barely seemed to notice the start bar getting packed full of memory-sapping apps, and continued to pop open new windows without hesitating. We tired of this game before the computer did, but we did manage to crash the machine when trying to shut it down with a dozen windows open, proving that all the performance hardware in the world can’t make up for inevitable software woes.

Software

Boutique builders know their audience, and performance enthusiasts do not care for convenience applications and “free offers” cluttering up their desktops. For that reason, AVA ships these systems sparkling clean, aside from the benchmarking utilities used for burn-in tests. If it’s a clean slate you’re looking for, this is it.

That’s not to say the system came without extras – they were just on CDs where they belong. AVA Direct included full versions of Company of Heroes and Call of Duty 4, both newer, mainstream games that you might actually still pick up in a retail store. We much preferred this slim selection of quality games to the approach of some other builders, which load their systems up with worthless demo discs and third-rate games no one has ever heard of.

The back of our test system

Benchmarks

Although we prefer to evaluate real-world performance rather than handing out scores based on synthetic benchmarks that don’t necessarily tell the real story about a system, we resorted to crunching a few numbers for this gaming machine. After all, a computer that can tear through nearly everything makes it tough to find its limits. Using 3DMark 06, our system produced a benchmark score of 15,875 3DMarks, which places it well above the “common system” that scores 11,600, but still far below the most tweaked-out rigs, which can reach above 30,000 3DMarks. While this means you won’t be king of the hill, if you’re out to compare specs with guys who have $10,000 PCs hooked up to liquid nitrogen IVs in their garages, in everyday usage, we wouldn’t assign the numbers too much importance. This machine hauls.

Boot Time

One of the most puzzling disappointments we ran across with this otherwise blazing system showed up as soon as we turned it on. And waited. And waited. Like a cold-blooded Camaro that needs a few stuttery laps around the block before it’s ready to roar, this machine startled us with its astoundingly slow boot time of 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Oddly enough, it also showed a completely black screen for long periods of the boot, leading us at first to believe we had hooked up the monitor improperly. If you’re the type who likes to leave a computer on all the time or in standby when not in use, the boot time probably won’t cause much of a headache. But environmentally conscious (or cheap) types who prefer to shut their systems off completely at night and fire them back up in the morning will have to grow accustomed to brushing their teeth, shaving, and maybe even regrowing a beard while this machine crawls to a start.