Premium price, premium spec, but can the HD 7990 really
justify that price tag?
You may have read, or be entirely sick
of reading, the reports that tip up four times a year decrying the state of the
PC industry. Quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year, PC desktop sales are dropping
like a stone. Even Intel is suffering (kind of).
PC
desktop sales are dropping like a stone.
But the take-home message is that
we’re all doomed and that desktop PC you love so much is now obsolete. So why
do we still insist on reviewing $4,125 PCs? It’s because these are the desktop
PCs people are actually buying. Sure, they’re not buying them in the same
volume as the $495 machines that once clogged up PC World, or the cheapo
laptops that looked like they came out of some chunky Christmas cracker.
One of the main reasons PC sales are
declining is that folk are opting for sexeh tablets and phat phones instead of
the everyday laptops they used to use for sitting on the couch watching kitteh
videos on YouTube. But you’re not going to opt for a tablet, phablet or phone
in the place of a proper gaming PC. That’s why our section of the PC market is
remaining remarkably resilient. When I spoke to one of Intel’s directors at IDF
this year he was talking about the PC gaming market in tens of billions of
dollars, and this 2.5k rig from Vibox is certainly going to help add to that.
One
of the main reasons PC sales are declining is that folk are opting for sexeh
tablets and phat phones instead of the everyday laptops they used to use for
sitting on the couch watching kitteh videos on YouTube.
Haswell, as well
As is the way with most modern gaming
PCs, this is a Haswell-based machine, rocking the familiar Core i7-4770K.
Despite the hefty Corsair H100i liquid chiller, Vibox has gone for a relatively
conservative overclock at 4.2GHz. It hasn’t stinted on the memory though, with
a full 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM running at 2,133MHz.
No punches have been pulled in the
choice of graphics card either, though rigs running the Radeon HD 7990 are few
and far between. You might wonder why when you see this machine hitting 42fps
at the highest settings of 2,560 x 1,600. Hell, it’s even capable of running
Metro Last Light at that resolution at over 30fps.
The reason we don’t see many HD 7990s
in gaming PCs isn’t really a question of price; it’s more about PC folks’
mistrust of AMD’s CrossFireX drivers. The HD 7990 is essentially a pair of
graphics cards jammed into one, and therefore has to use CrossFireX drivers to
operate as a single unit. Unfortunately that can mean waiting around for
profiles to be made for the latest games before you can use the second GPU
you’ve paid the big bucks for, and a constant niggling worry in the back of
your head that something might not work.
And when Nvidia has something like the
GK110- powered GTX Titan and GTX 780 cards offering simplified, single-GPU
gaming at a comparable level for the same price (or less), the HD 7990 becomes
much less attractive.
We checked out Scan’s 3XS Vengeance
780 a while back, and despite being almost $1,650 less than this machine, it’s
very close in performance terms. The Hyperion is definitely a top-end machine,
but there are more cost-effective ways to pull it all off.
The
Hyperion is definitely a top-end machine, but there are more cost-effective
ways to pull it all off.
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Vital Statistics
·
Price: $6,828 ·
Manufacturer:
Vibox ·
CPU: Intel Core
i7 4770K @ 4.2GHz ·
Motherboard:
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-OC ·
Memory: 16GB
Corsair Vengeance DDR3 @ 2,133MHz ·
Graphics: XFX HD
7990 ·
Storage: 240GB
Corsair Neutron GTX SSD, 2TB WD HDD ·
PSU: XFX Pro
850W ·
OS: Windows 864-bit
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