Polywell Poly X5800A3-990X: Where’s Our Six-Core Overclock?

Polywell's Poly X5800A3-990X ($3499 as of March one, 2011) illustrates how close the competition is atop the performance desktop Laptop chart. The X5800A3's robust showing on our tests puts it correct with almost all of its rivals. The problem? Others do far better.

Below its hood, the Poly X5800A3-990X packs Intel's six-core Core i7-990X processor, which can be merely a clock improve outside of the acquainted Core i7-980X that many PCs already use. Presented the X5800A3-990X's mixture of the self-contained liquid cooling technique along with a stock-clock, three.47GHz chip, the system's 12GB of DDR3-1333 memory seems like overkill. Polywell need to have invested a lot more in juice for its CPU, the center in the Pc.

The $3999 iBuyPower Paladin XLC--which beefs up its Core i7-980X CPU from 3.33GHz to 4.2GHz--outperformed the X5800A3-990X on our WorldBench 6 suite of assessments by 11 details (198 as opposed to 187). The Paladin also offers a 128GB RAID-0 array of solid-state drives (the Polywell has a solitary 60GB SSD boot generate), along with a 2TB storage drive (the Polywell has a 1TB product). And boutique vendor V3 Gaming PC's Convoy desktop scored even larger (a WorldBench six mark of 204) for the significantly reduced price ($2499).

The X5800A3-990X parlays its Crossfire configuration of two ATI Radeon HD6970 cards into an remarkable body fee of 175.8 frames per second on our Unreal Tournament three benchmark check (run at a resolution of 2560 by 1600, prime quality), vs . 147.1 fps for the Paladin XLC and 204 fps.

This Poly uses an Antec Six hundred situation bred for air cooling and highlighted by a huge, 200mm, adjustable-speed fan. However, you'l need to use a screwdriver to put in or modify any device within the X5800A3's body.

Four USB ports, a Blu-ray combo push, along with a multiformat card reader adorn the front from the X5800A3-990X. The style with the front panels feels somewhat askew, nonetheless.

Polywell does a fantastic career together with the neat cabling inside the chassis. The program offers three 5.25-inch bays (a single open up), in addition 5 3.5-inch bays for future hard-drive purchases.With ample energy, you would possibly be able to plug a gadget to the system's free PCI Convey x4 and PCI Convey x16 slots, as well, but functioning round the two beastly graphics boards can be a challenge.

The system's rear connection possibilities incorporate two USB three.0 ports, an SPDIF optical and coaxial port, four USB two.0 ports, one particular gigabit ethernet port, one FireWire 400 port, and built-in 7.one surround sound--but not eSATA. The system's two videocards deliver a complete of four DVI ports, two HDMI ports, and 4 mini-DisplayPort connections.

Our evaluation design from the X5800A3-990X delivered with no any mice or keyboards, however you can customize your machine that has a wide array of input units at Polywell's Website, if you determine to drag the set off.

Polywell's Poly X5800A3-990X is really a great efficiency desktop, but it's just not nearly as good as several of its rivals.