Armari Gravistar SR review

The Opteron 185 CPU nestles in the nVidia nForce4-equipped Tyan S2865 motherboard; a large copper-finned heatsink topped with a big 92mm fan keeps thing cool. The 110W thermal design power of the Opteron means the system is in no danger of failing to warm your study in winter, though, and the FireGL's nominal maximum power consumption is 80W. There should be no danger of overloading the system's power supply, even with a full complement of four Raptor drives, since the power supply is rated at a healthy 645W.

Benchmark performance is astonishing. The overall application benchmark score of 1.44 is the fastest result we've ever seen, and by quite some margin; particularly impressive is the multitasking score of 1.46. It made short work of heavyweight image editing too, with an individual Photoshop test score of 1.34.

The FireGL 7350 is so fast that our 3ds Max render preview test - which uses the graphics subsystem to produce a draft pass rather than rendering via the CPU - completed 500 frames in just 15 seconds: this is faster than real-time, something we've never seen before. In the not-too-distant past, the scene we use for this test severely hammered even ultra high-end cards.

The price of the Gravistar is hefty, but in return you get a system that's more powerful than anything we've ever seen. It's a high premium for that extra 20 per cent or so of performance over a standard high-end PC, but if you need it the Gravistar SR delivers.

Author: David Fearon