Gaming, Final Thoughts, HEXUS.awards, HEXUS.where2buy & HEXUS.right2reply
Gaming resultsDue to time constraints, we didn't have a chance to run numbers on our Intel Presler system with the XFX GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB XXX Edition card specified in the Armari Pantheon FX. However, to give you an idea of potential performance from such a GPU, allied to the power of an overclocked Athlon 64 FX-60, we ran three of our regular graphics-card benchmarking suite at 1600x1200 4x antialiasing 16x anisotropic filtering, to see what kind of performance Armari's SFF box pushed out.
High resolution testing with copious amounts of I.Q. still return healthy framerates from three modern gaming engines. Unless you've invested in a 30-inch panel from Apple or Dell that run at a native 2560x1600 pixels, there's nothing much a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB (overclocked) won't run at acceptable framerates. Our advice is simple. Switch the machine on, whack your monitor resolution all the way up, add some juicy eye candy, and play away. Plug and play at its best!
Final thoughts
The Armari Pantheon FX system is a decidedly niche product. It's designed to appeal to those of you with a large wedge of cash to spend on a PC, yet don't want to splash it on some run-of-the-mill affair. Armari has taken the step of engineering a gaming machine with some of the tastiest components available at the start of 2006 and amalgamated them into a sexy-looking small form-factor unit sourced from the folks at SilverStone. It's clear from the choice of components that performance is of foremost concern. AMD's Athlon 64 FX-60 is the probably the fastest dual-core x86 CPU right now but Armari goes further by pre-overclocking it to 2.8GHz; 200MHz faster than default. Then there's the XFX GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB XXX Edition, humming along at 580MHz core and 1730MHz memory. Just those two choices tells us that this is one serious gaming machine that's housed in a chic chassis. An SLI'd/CrossFired rig would prove to be faster, sure, but only if you're willing to sacrifice the portability of the Pantheon FX and choose a larger chassis.
Armari has further sprinkled in 2GBytes of Corsair RAM, 500GBs of hard-drive space that's spread over two 250GB SATA drives an configured for speed (RAID0), top-quality sound from Creative's X-Fi range, excellent HID devices, and decent DVD ReWriter. The end result is a beastly machine that just rips through our testing suite, setting the highest S.I. benchmarks we've seen thus far on a consumer-level machine.
All this power comes at the cost of £2,395, or £2,472.86, should you wish to pay by credit card and include the delivery charge. That price doesn't include a monitor, and you can set a complete budget of £3,000 once you factor in a complimentary screen and speakers. Some will say that you can buy a decent car for that. You probably can, but you'll be hard-pushed to find a faster system, pre-built with attention to detail, for much less money.
Armari has already stated that shipping models, from today, will feature revised cooling that's significantly quieter than our sample. In an ideal world, we'd probably opt for system memory with lower latencies, to make the most out of the CPU's grunt, and we'd like a 3-year warranty cover as standard, even if subsequent years are simply return to base. Lastly, a speaker package would be nice. These things aside, if you've got £2,500 burning a hole in your account (student loan?) and want a super-fast machine that's housed in a small-ish chassis, the Pantheon simply demands to be on your shortlist. Expensive? Yes. Fast? Oh, yes.
HEXUS Awards
HEXUS Where2Buy
The ARMARI Pantheon-FX will be available to purchase directly from the ARMARI Website after 12:00hrs today (12th January 2006) from this URL.
HEXUS Right2Reply
HEXUS invites the manufacturers and vendors that supply HEXUS with products for evaluation to comment on the reviews and previews that we publish. HEXUS have invited AMD and their representatives to comment on this article. If they choose to respond, we'll publish their response verbatim.
Be sure and check back later today for ARMARI's take on our take, including exclusive pictures of the Pantheon-FX revised, quieter, thermal control system.
