Hi-Grade Ultis Tachyon

Intel has finally moved on from the NetBurst architecture of the Pentium 4 in favour of a new, more efficient way of handling tasks. And Core 2 Duo has stunned us with its speed in dealing with our strenuous application benchmarks - just see p46 for confirmation. But Core 2 Duo has continued with the tradition of having an Extreme version. Unlike the Pentium Extreme Editions, the Core 2 Duo Extreme chip is physically the same as any other Core 2 Duo, it just runs at 2.93GHz - the fastest Intel is willing to push a Core 2 Duo chip at the moment.

Unlike some other all-out performance PCs, this one isn't an eyesore. The demure case does hold plenty of treats, though. There are two 1GB sticks of DDR2 RAM, albeit running at 533MHz rather than the 800MHz the motherboard supports, with two sockets left for future expansion. And with Windows and apps installed on a Western Digital Raptor 150, with its platters spinning at 10,000rpm, the application-based benchmark score of 1.77 is surprisingly near to the 1.89 of Vadim's PC, which uses an overclocked E6700.

However, the water-cooling arrangement in the Vadim makes it much quieter, especially when it's under load. After half an hour of intensive work, the Hi-Grade becomes much louder.

It's no surprise considering the high-end components that need cooling inside it. Not only is there a top-end CPU, but also two GPUs. The fact that they're from Nvidia is a slight surprise given that SLI doesn't currently run on the Intel 975 core logic used, but the two GPUs are housed on the mighty GeForce 7950 GX2 card. Appearing to Windows as a single GPU, the SLI restriction doesn't apply.

The card is essentially a PCB shrink of the cards used in the first Quad SLI systems, but they can now be bought separately. We found one for £329 exc VAT on www.morecomputers.com (code CGNX-X795).

Just like the first Quad SLI cards, the GPUs have throttled clock speeds when compared to conventional desktop 7900 GTXs: the core runs at 500MHz to the 650MHz 7900 GTX core, while the 512MB of RAM speed for each GPU is down from 800MHz to 600MHz. But with all components closely linked, and an optimised driver, we still saw astronomical 3D speeds. The HDR effects in Far Cry - which require millions of high-precision calculations every second - were dismissed with ease, the timedemo running in excess of 60fps even at our highest test settings. And the realistic smoke and fog effects of Call of Duty 2 were rendered with similar speed, with the test rushing along at an average 46fps even at 1,600 x 1,200 with maximum detail settings and 4x AA and 8x AF applied.

The motherboard does have three PCI Express graphics slots, which are currently of use only in an ATi setup. The third slot is fed with four PCI Express lanes for 1GB/sec bandwidth and is intended to house a Radeon X1600 Pro or higher for use as a dedicated physics processor. Hi-Grade offers this system with ATi CrossFire configurations, although you'll have to wait for the ATi Physics drivers and supported games.

While the Western Digital Raptor provides 150GB of main system storage dedicated to Windows and application files, a second 500GB Caviar RE2 disk offers SATA II compatibility, allowing for up to 3GB/sec data transfer speed, native command queuing and a 16MB cache. It's a good arrangement, leaving the option of using the Raptor's performance where necessary, but the capacity of the Caviar RE2 for everything else.