Review: Monarch Computer's Nemesis FX-57 7800 SLI Gaming

A couple weeks back now, I had the pleasure of testing and using Monarch Computer's Nemesis FX-57 8700 SLI Gaming machine. This model is a top-of-the-line gaming rig; I'm currently testing the Hornet machine as well. Read below for my take on the machine.

One of the first things that should be acknowledged is that this version of the Nemesis is a very high end gaming machine. The price for the system that I had been testing was over $5000. There's the scary-fast base system itself, but then you throw on full THX surround sound, the customzied keyboard and mouse that Monarch produces - and while you are talking about top-dollar, you are also talking about top performance.

The system itself is as below:

Case: Thermaltake Custom Painted Shark Full Tower Aluminum Case Series w/Window (Fire Pearl)
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Power Supply: Enermax Noisetaker EG701AX-VE-SFMA ATX 2.0 w/SLI Support 600W Power Supply

Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium nForce4 SLI Audio, GB-LAN, IEEE, USB, PCI-E, SATAII w/RAID, DDR-400, ATX
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Processors: AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (939)
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Heat Sink: Zalman CNPS7000-CU Copper CPU Fan

Memory: 2 GB (4 pcs 512MB) DDR (400) PC-3200 Corsair w/LED Display (TWINX1024-3200XLPRO)

Hard Drives: 1 x Western Digital 74 GB SATA 10K Raptor (WD740GD), 2 x Western Digital Caviar SE 250 GB SATAII 16MB Cache 7200 RPM (WD2500KS)

RAID Setup: RAID 0 (Zero) Setup

DVD-RW: Plextor PX-716SA DVD±RW 16x8x16x DVD+RW 48x24x48x CD-RW SATA

Floppy: Mitsumi Floppy 7-in-1 USB Card Reader/Smart Media Drive (Black)

Video Cards: 2 x NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB GDDR3, VIVO/, Dual-DVI

Sound Card: Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum INT Drive Sound

Wireless NIC: D-Link DWL-AG530 Tri-Mode Dualband (2.4/5GHz) Wireless 108Mbps PCI Adapter

Industry Standard Upgradable

USB Ports on front of case

6 Month Warranty - Free tech support
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All Monarch PCs include: 48-72 hr. Burn-in Diagnostic (to ensure all components are malfunction free); Latest BIOS, drivers, and tested patches installed (All drivers are also included on CD); award-winning assembly and installation including tie-off on all cables (for improved airflow); final 62-point inspection by Intel and AMD Certified Technicians, and Free Unlimited Phone Support. All manuals, disks, cables and other accessories included with your retail components will be included with your system.

As is fairly obvious, the machine's specs are pretty hardcore. In doing some of the standard testing, the system turned out a 3DMark05 test of 13,002 whichout missing a beat. Similarly, the Sysmark04 score was a studly 225. To be blunt, I don't think I've ever seen those types of numbers before - in real life, that is.

What was even more impressive for me at least was the machine's ability to handle that most important of tasks - playing games. Playing Doom 3, with all graphic options cranked (including the console accessible ones) this machine still turned out a 80.2 FPS. Turning off the console options, and just going in ultra-mode had a frame rate of 87.3, sustained. My other gaming obessions, World of Warcraft (Props to Ajul-Nerub server!) managed to turn in a more paltry 77.3 FPS, but given the fact that you are often depending on your connection with WoW for some of that, that's pretty amazing. DivX encoding was also quite fast - 1574 seconds on the sample size that I used.

The more subtle touch on the machine was evident as well - you can open the thing up from multiple angles, with a swing front door on it, and the lighting was handled nicely. And given the machine's power and draw, I was fairly impressed with the noise from the various fans. The heat output from the machine is fairly impressive; you'll not need that space heater in the room anymore in the winter time, but the actual heat inside of the machine case, and CPU always stayed well within manufacturer recommended ranges. While running the very high-end graphic testing of Doom 3, the temp did get some spikes, but nothing that was concerning. The nVidia 7800 duals make a huge difference.

One of the other features that I liked is the fast primary drive, and back-up, slower, but RAIDed drives. It's nice for installing high access demand apps on the primary, but using the other drives as storage drives. The other comment I would make, speaking as an obessive wire organizer, is that the machine itself ships very very nicely tied off cabling-wise. I think this looks nice, but also, I would suspect, makes a appreciable difference to the heat flow. One other important note is that they offer a 3 year 24/7 support plan - all warranties are different options, 'course.

In short, the machines rocks. The issue, of course, is the pricing - but if you are looking for a top end machine, this is a phenomenal rig. Monarch does a great job of supporting the product, with a great packet of documentation and information that comes with the machine, but also active forum postings and involvement from the tech support on their boards. Great company, great machine.

PSU

[Sduic]

Is that a quality PSU? Because that sysytem's probably going to need it.

this just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in: a computer built with the highest end components yields the highest end performance.

This was the most blatant advertisement as an "article" that I have ever seen. Too bad Monarch's servers can't handle the load; it makes the advertisement far less effective.

Something disturbing

[yfmaster]

they list a feature on the motherboard, "IEEE". Do they realize that IEEE is an orginization, and not a part? The number that goes after IEEE is more important, like 802.11 or 1394

RAID Setup: RAID 0 (Zero) Setup

[Malc]

"RAID Setup: RAID 0 (Zero) Setup"

Stupid stupid stupid.

Have fun rebuiliding your system. Really this shouldn't even be labelled "RAID setup". There is no redundancy (the R in RAID). Two discs stripped like this means you have two chances of losing everything on *both* of them. Is hard drive performance so critical that the chance is worth it?

While we're plugging PC makers, overdrivepc.com

[MattW]

I bought an Overdrive PC Torque.SLI [overdrivepc.com] a while back. I talked with Mario there, who actually talked me down off a higher end processor, telling me he could hook me up with a slightly lower end, $800 cheaper processor but get far more overclocking out of it than the faster process.

It's fast as hell, and when it had a stability issue due to the overclocking (yes, it was pushing it), he helped tweak it to where it was rock solid.

If you're going to pay this much for a computer, get someone who actually knows how to squeeze the maximum out of it, if you don't have the time or ability to do it yourself.

Learn how RAID works...

[ErMaC]

Why does Hemos think that backing things up to a RAID0 which is "slower" is a convenient thing?

RAID0 is FASTER than a single drive configuration, because you're doubling the number of spindles and heads working together. It also offers NO REDUNDANCY so backing up anything to a RAID0 is completely and utterly retarded. He's got everything ass-backwards.

This is why reviews on Slashdot are moronic, whether it's Zork's misinformed and useless game reviews or hardware reviews by the tech-uneducated editors. Stick to linking to real review sites guys, please.

Now watch in a day there will be a Slashdot story linking to Hemos's review...

Warranty?

[moorcito]

For $5000, you'd think the warrenty would be a bit longer than 6 months. I realize that tech gets old pretty fast, but aren't they being a bit optimistic that in 6 months you'll realize how old school your PC had become and fork over another $5000.

Re:The Bare Minimum

[kollivier]

Ah, part of the TCO equation! But, heck, you should be able to buy this system for $3000 a year from now. Funny how this pricing reminds me of what it cost to have 1 PC XT with MS-DOS on it back in the mid-eighties.

I can't see anyone truly concerned about money buying this box. I like games as much as the next guy (or gal), but I don't have $5000 to drop just to get a 'more hardcore rig', and I don't even see why I would need one. I mean, think about it - does a game really need to push your hardware to the very limit in order to be fun? Of course not. Game developers try to push the hardware just to see what they can do, and gamers buy these systems just to show off what their 'hardcore rig' can do. This is like a Porche for geeks. Well, actually, probably more like a heavily modded monster truck. ;) You don't buy it so much because you need what it does, you buy it because you want to show everyone else what it can do.

I bet the Revolution is going to blow these boxes away in terms of fun-factor anyways, and it's probably going to be under $300. How's that for ROI? :)

Re:Learn how RAID works...

[WillerZ]

Speaking of moronic, where did the "ass-backwards" come from? Surely ass-forwards is a more unconventional orientation?

Re:My favortie board

[ltwally]

"Sound Card: Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum INT Drive Sound

Can anyone explain what is up with this? The board comes with 8 channel sound built in. What do you need a separate sound card for? Is the sound quality really that much better?"

I'll take a stab at answering that question:

Anyone serious about either audio or gaming adds a dedicated sound card. And a good one (ie. audigy2 or better). Your onboard 8-channel sound is a minimal solution, and offers very little hardware acceleration, making it subpar for gaming. (What gamer wants 5-10% of the cpu's attention to be stuck on doing audio, when a good sound blaster can drop that to 0-3%) Also of consideration is audio quality; as a basic rule-of-thumb, onboard audio is going to be built using lower quality DAC's and other components. The signal-to-noise ratio isn't going to be stellar, and is thus not suitable for serious audio enthusiasts.

In short, onboard sound may be fine for listening to mp3's on your computer speakers, and may even be good enough for those that only play occasional games... but no serious geek would consider onboard audio as a replacement for a decent soundcard.. especially when you can get a basic Audigy2 for under $50.

Not to be rude... but your lack of knowledge about computer hardware makes your suggestions moot. Not that the other components you mention are bad.. it's just that it's hard to take your recommendations seriously when you display a lack of basic knowledge about hardware. Please refrain from making recommendations until you are better versed in the subject.

Re:SLI is always a waste

[QuantumPion]

I think the real purpose of the 7800 gtx/sli is for people playing the latest games on HDTV's, which are 1920x1080 resolution. While playing on a big TV, you still need AA so playing Battlefield 2 at 1920x1080 with 4x AA requires quite a bit of horsepower.

Re:Learn how RAID works...

[Guysmiley777]

RAID-0 is not automatically faster than a single drive, especially with a crappy integrated RAID controller.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:My favortie board

[wernercd]

I hate to point out the obvious but I would wager that the average /.er does build his/her own systems...

your preachin too the choir

FX-57/4800+

[mobby_6kl]

A friend of mine asked me to help chose components for his next PC, and, not paying attention to the prices, we (actually, 'I' would be more appropriate) decided on a single 7800GTX and X2-4800+ instead of two cards in SLI and FX-57. Although the possibility of adding a second gfx card still remains, we decided to only buy one card. It would always be possible to buy a second one, or throw the current one out and buy next gen card which would grind two of these into dust anyway.

Now, FX-57 usually beats the X2-4800+ in games, but by a rather small margin: 5-6fps was the most significant difference. What makes the difference is adding a background task, like file compression or Skype or whatever. FX-57 drops almost in half (if the task is significant), while the X2 only slows down by 3-5fps. Hopefully game developers will take advantage of all the additional cores and the X2 would be even better in the future.

The whole system cost about $2500, including a quality case and PSU, two 250gb drives and all the other stuff necessary.

Re:There's Nothing Cool about Creative

[Malor]

All of the SBLive and Audigy cards do an internal resample from 44.1Khz to 48khz. If you're listening on good gear, this really screws the sound up. Unless you can stay at 48khz from source to delivery, you DO NOT want to route sound through an Audigy if you really care about the quality.

The Audiotrak Prodigy and M-Audio Revolution 7.1 are both solid cards, with better DACs than the Audigy has, and they don't do the 48khz butchering. If you drive them with ASIO or kernel streaming, you can get true lossless output.

For whatever weird reason, the M-Audio Sonica Theater, if you configure it for 44.1Khz out, will do perfect lossless output even on normal programs like iTunes or Windows Media Player. Somehow, it avoid Windows' kmixer and sends an undamaged bitstream. Using that card, you can play a DTS-encoded .WAV file over fiber or coax to your stereo, even with iTunes or WMP, and have it sound perfect.

It's very hard to get really good sound out of Windows... if your sound education has been on a computer, chances are extremely high that you don't yet know very much. It was certainly a learning curve for me.... at this point, at least I know I'm ignorant.