The HK-Xtreme Arrives
(click to enlarge) | | UPS delivers the HK-Xtreme -- the kitty likes it. |
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(click to enlarge) | | Let's open this box up. Hey, good protection on top. |
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I made sure I got home early on the day of arrival. I knew that UPS wasn't going to leave a machine worth approximately $3800 on my doorstep. Lucky for me the driver actually placed the box inside my house. Then he slid it a few feet on the wood floor! Yikes! I'll take it from here, thank you very much.
(click to enlarge) | | There's the keyboard and other accessories. |
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(click to enlarge) | | Here's the machine, nicely wrapped in plastic and surrounded by foam. |
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(click to enlarge) | | Say, who's that on the custom laser-etched window? Why, it's Big Al! |
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(click to enlarge) | | Let's open the door and see the optical drives. Nice etch of Zeebo. |
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The machine arrived in one piece. It powered up after I placed it on my workbench and attached the monitor, keyboard, mouse, power, and audio cables. I have a KVM setup on my workbench that has four ports. This is very handy for running multiple systems at one time, except that four systems running on one circuit would probably trip the circuit breaker!
Test Setup and Process
Eight gamers were assembled for an in-depth series of independent evaluations, pitting the HK-Xtreme against the best that I...er...Big Al's Computers has to offer. We played lots of games separately on all six machines, a few games across the LAN on both our own game server and an Internet server, and we used the same game on multiple machines. Every gamer had a chance to play on several machines in addition to the HK-Xtreme.
A few HK-Xtreme benchmarks were taken just to be sure everything was on the 'up and up', but the whole point of the review was to see the HK-Xtreme in action. We ran 3DMark06 on the HK-Xtreme (4075 vs. 4087 obtained by CPU magazine) and on OsbornAgain (wouldn't run "" blue screen). We ran the Sandra Lite 2005 CPU Arithmetic Benchmark on the HK-Xtreme (ALU = 16752 MIPS, Whetstone = 8017 MFlops) and also on OsbornAgain (ALU = 17989 MIPS, Whetstone = 8150 MFlops). We pushed all the machines by playing Doom III, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty 2, Arcanum, Battle Field 2, and things of this nature. We did this for more than ten hours. You know, a typical weekend if you are a serious gamer...
To ensure we collected independent thoughts and comments as the day progressed, an evaluation form was prepared ahead of time. A summary of the results will be presented later in this review. Some choice comments were shown on the first page below the gamer's picture, extracted just like they were stated on the evaluation forms. Every one of the gamers (except for me) completed an evaluation form. I spent $50 on pizza, so I was determined to get my data!
Each machine on the wired LAN was allocated the same bandwidth through a common router, but the machines themselves varied in ability and cost. The 'Printer-to-Computer-Deja-Vu' machine, which contains two complete gaming systems within one chassis, had its left side shut down so I could use the monitor and desk for the HK-Xtreme machine. Let me present a brief listing of the components in the major machines.
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