ATi has actually released three different CrossFire master cards, not just the X850 and inside this Cube Serpens machine you’ll fi nd a pair of X800 XL cards working in tandem. This rendition of CrossFire was originally intended to be pitched against a pair of the 6800 GTs, but just as the X850 XT has been affected by the release of the 7800GTX, so the drop in Nvidia’s prices affects this comparison too, making this a less exciting offering than it may have been.
Initial impressions are reasonable, with four boxes worth of kit for your money. The case isn’t going to excite the enthusiast crowd that this machine is clearly aimed at. The dull shading and serious aesthetics are a little too sombre for the neon-loving gamer. The front panel does hide a couple of USB ports and the headphone sockets though, so it’s certainly a useful design, just not an inspiring one. There’s a distinct lack of thumbscrews, which makes gaining access to the machine’s innards a little tricky too.
The inside of the machine is reasonably neat, although the shear amount of cables needed does introduce a few accessibility problems around the central column of wires. Cube has countered this slightly by using a power supply that uses sockets, instead of just providing a multitude of cables. The fact that it offers a peak output of 525w means that it should last you a while too.
The strangest aspect of this whole system is the screen. Cube has bundled a 19in TFT with this machine, offering a thoroughly competent 12ms response time. The problem is this screen has a maximum resolution of 1,280×1,024 pixels, which limits the usefulness of the CrossFire setup signifi cantly. Admittedly the cutting-edge game titles will probably see this resolution as something of a performance sweet spot, but for everything else the raw, polygon-pushing grunt of this system is going to see such a low resolution as a bottleneck. In fact, when it came to testing the capabilities of this machine we hooked it up to a CRT capable of rendering at 1,600×1,200, which is the maximum resolution supported by CrossFire rig.
Performance blips
As this rendition of CrossFire uses X800 XL graphics cards this isn’t a solution vying for rendering dominance, but it still produces a reasonable punch when pushed. The 3DMark03 and 05 scores of 17,068 and 8,798 respectively are both higher than anything produced by a single card, although if you’re in search of the best performance possible you will be sorely disappointed. Doom 3 managed a silky smooth 88.6fps at 1,024×768, but this dropped down to 46.7fps when the resolution is increased to 1,600×1,200. Similar drops in performance are seen when the resolution is increased in other games, although FarCry did manage to stay above the all important 60fps threshold.
When it comes to more serious performance, the Cube Serpens struts its stuff admirably enough, managing an overall score in SYSMark 2004 of 232. The fact that it packs a pair of 200GB Seagate Barracudas as a striped array, certainly helps keep the hard drive performance ticking over nicely, while 1GB of RAM is more than enough room for normal offi ce applications as well as more creative pursuits in Photoshop and its ilk.
The biggest problem with this machine is that a little more money will buy you a 7800GT SLI machine, which will outperform this PC signifi cantly while at the same time offering support for Shader Model 3.0 rendering. This is a shame, because in many ways this is a brilliant machine; just ask Cube for the 7800GT version instead …
