Quad SLI gaming for cheapskates
The guys over at destructoid.com weren't too impressed with Dell's $10,000 pricetag for the company's flagship Renegade system so they decided to take the matter into their own hands by collating the key components of a custom built Quad SLI gaming rig. Breaking their imaginary system down, they found that the main areas essential for building a machine comparable in performance to the Renegade were:
Duh, the Quad SLI graphics cards. A budget of around $2800 should set you up with a 4 card bundle.
A Gigabyte Quad SLI motherboard to stick those four cards in, $240.
Pentium 3.73GHz Extreme, $1300.
10,000 RPM Hard Drive and 2GB of branded RAM, $450.
Battlefield 2 at 1600x1200 with graphics on full, priceless.
Chuck in a case, cooling, sound card, DVD drive and peripherals (keyboard, mouse and 2.1 speaker system) and you're looking at a budget of $6,000 for a well equipped Quad SLI system. That's around $2,000 less than the Renegade PC (sans the $2,199 30" widescreen monitor that Dell includes with their system) so you're not quite saving the $4,000 that the destructoid guys claim you will.
The obvious downsides to building your own Quad SLI rig include: the hassle of constructing the system and installing Windows yourself (although we're sure most people could do a better job than Dell) and the lack of a warranty, but before you think about these problems ask yourself the question: is that red flame color scheme worth two grand?
[Thanks, Franco]
