CoreI7-990x
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Pure Luxury takes DARWINmachine's Hammerhead PC, adds primo parts and lifetime warranty
Does this badass gaming rig look familiar? It should -- it's basically a DARWINmachine Hammerhead HMR989 with some sweet, sweet cherries on top. In an attempt to live up to its name, Pure Luxury's pimped it out with an Intel Core i7-990X processor, 12GB of pricey Kingston RAM, two NVIDIA GTX 580 graphics cards, two 128GB SSDs, 2TB of magnetic storage, and a Blu-ray drive for good measure. The company claims the killer combo can boot in four seconds, and run Call of Duty: Black Ops at 1920 x 1200 resolution with 8xMSAA at 285fps. All of those components plug into an ASUS Rampage III Gene motherboard and a 1.2 kilowatt modular power supply to juice the blood-red monster machine, and there's a lifetime warranty with 24/7 phone support. Should any of those expensive parts fail, Pure Luxury says it'll replace them with equal or better performing components and foot the shipping bill too. Of course, all this luxury doesn't come cheap -- you'll drop $9,500 before you see one of these puppies shipped to your house. Makes the original $2,900 Hammerhead look downright affordable, no? %Gallery-118728%
Intel Core i7-990X reviewed: best performance ever, but far from best value
As T-Pain once so wisely proclaimed, "it ain't hardcore unless it's hexacore." Intel should have no worries with its Core i7-990X, which has enough processing units to satisfy even the most demanding of hip hop moguls, but it pads out its extreme credentials anyway with an audacious 3.46GHz default speed. That can be Turbo Boosted to 3.73GHz (yes, we are talking about a CPU that can run at 3,730MHz right out of the box) and there's 12MB of L3 cache and three channels for DDR3 memory to justify the $999 price tag. Well, to partially justify it, anyhow. Tech Report and Tom's Hardware both ran this new chip through their benchmarking suites and both concluded it's the fastest consumer processor around, but neither was willing to recommend it as a terribly astute purchase decision. Then again, when has an Extreme Edition of anything ever been a good value proposition?
Intel Core i7-990X stealthily hits shelves, Origin PC overclocks one to a lap-melting 4.6GHz
These days it's less about the megahertz and more about the cores, but custom PC maker Origin isn't leaving either benchmark untouched. It's taken the as-yet-unannounced six-core, 3.46GHz Intel Core i7-990X processor and pushed it up to 4.6GHz -- a full 200 hertz more than the company's previous hotness, a 4.4GHZ Core i7-980X. The 990X is now available in the company's desktops as well as the EON-17 laptop -- which is honestly pushing the boundaries of lapablity. Think you can do better than that -- say, with a little LN2? You'll find the Core i7-990X at the likes of Mwave and Newegg for what we're sure is a perfectly reasonable $1,050 right now. [Thanks, Travis]
