CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme FTW: Performance at Any Cost

It's time for another break from the Computex 2011 coverage, this time with an extreme system review.

There seems to be an interesting cottage industry between custom desktop boutiques in trying to build the single fastest machine consumers can buy, and it's not at all dissimilar to the kind of competitive thinking that produces utterly impractical video cards like the AMD Radeon HD 6990 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 that threaten to populate those machines. Somewhere along the line, someone said "screw it" and decided to figure out just how much of a speed demon they could build while still being able to market and sell it to consumers and support it without tarnishing the brand. DigitalStorm has pretty aggressively held on to our "fastest computer we've ever tested" crown for a while, but CyberPowerPC looks to steal it away with their Gamer Xtreme FTW Edition. Read on to find out if they succeed... and how much this puppy will set you back.

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SAPPHIRE Brings Back AMD Radeon HD 5800 Series with New Xtreme Editions

Hailed as the most exciting development in graphics for several generations, the original SAPPHIRE HD 5800 series not only included the fastest single GPU available, but was also the first family of video cards in the world to support the advanced graphical features of Microsoft DirectX 11 and multi-monitor displays in Eyefinity mode. Now it’s back – with the exciting new SAPPHIRE HD 5800 series Xtreme Editions! Two models will be available from April 2011 – the SAPPHIRE HD 5850 Xtreme and the SAPPHIRE HD 5830 Xtreme. Both will represent spectacular value for money – and support all the latest games and applications.

With a 150GB/s memory interface to 1GB of the latest GDDR5 memory, and a GPU architecture with a total of 1440 stream processors and 72 texture units, the new SAPPHIRE HD 5850 Xtreme speeds through older DirectX10.1, DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0 games and applications – as well as delivering stunning levels of performance, detail, transparency and lighting effects in the latest DX11 games and applications. Not far behind is the SAPPHIRE HD 5830 Xtreme Edition with its 1120 stream processors and 56 texture units. With its core clocks of 800MHz and 1GB of DDR5 memory with speeds of 1000MHz (4GHz effective), it represents a breakthrough in value for money for the gamer. Both cards feature new SAPPHIRE original cooler designs, and optimised voltage regulation, which together with clock and memory speeds can be adjusted with the SAPPHIRE TriXX overclocking tool (free for users to download) to enhance performance. Both cards offer support for all the advanced graphical features of Microsoft DirectX 11 and deliver spectacular video clarity, speed and visual effects.