Primordial Medusa: Includes the Kitchen Sink - broadwateruterming

At a Glance

Skilled's Rating

Pros

Outstanding gaming public presentation
Three discrete GPUs
Liquid cooled

Cons

Instead tasteless superficial
Passing valuable

Our Verdict

This liquid-cooled juggernaut is a tad excessive — in all the right shipway.

Surplusage: Information technology's the defining characteristic of the PCs that sit atop our performance desktop chart, vying for supremacy by cramming bleeding-edge components into massive hulls.

Primordial Computers' Medusa ticks all of the requisite boxes: big case, lofty moniker, a dizzying array of tubes, and a monstrous price tag ($6495). Just PCs are more than just the union of their parts–does the Jellyfish earn a blemish amongst PCWorld's High Functioning desktops? In a word, yes.

I'll start with the guts. The Medusa is collective around an Intel Core group i7-3960X processor. This is the newly released Flaxen Bridge Extreme Edition CPU, but Primordial Computers has overclocked IT to 4.9GHz. That CPU is spiny-backed up past 32GB of RAM (Correction: Four 8GB RAM sticks only bring up up four of the eight DIMM slots, leaving four free), and a fair bit of storage space: two 120GB Intel 520 solid-state drives in Foray 0, and a 2TB storage drive. A Blu-irradiate burner provides access to your optical media.

About that molten-chilling array: It's…thorough. Everything is liquid cooled–the three AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards, the CPU, the Random-access memory, even the motherboard. A bit overmuch? I think so. But you volition non need for thermal headroom, if you're one to play with voltages and core clocks.

Totally of that manage pays off–the Medusa attained a score of 207 on our new WorldBench 7 benchmarks suite, a few pegs high than other machines along the chart. As expected, it's no slouch in the gaming department–91.8 frames per second in Crysis 2, and 187.1 fps in Dirt 3, at a declaration of 2560 by 1600 pixels, on high settings. Anything over 30 fps is considered playable, and 60 fps is the gold standard for a silken experience. These dramatically higher results are nice, though; you won't pauperism to upgrade this behemoth anytime soon.

The Medusa's innards are housed in a Corsair 800D case. It's a familiar soma that's spent quite a bit of time on PCWorld's charts, and is unrivalled of my favorites. Getting inside is well-situated, as the case walls pop off at the drive of a button. Just once you'ray in, you may non find much to do: The liquid cooling system means taking a lot of tubing apart if you actually want to arrive there and make about changes.

The four hard-drive out bays are held in a separate, buff-cooled bay. They're readily accessible from the front of the case, and drives can well be swapped in and out–just insistency a latch, and pull on the tray. Tool-free and accessible–always appreciated.

The trio of artwork cards crack a tot up of three HDMI ports, six mini-DisplayPort connectors, and 3 DVI ports. On the motherboard, you'll find sixer USB ports, four USB 3.0 ports, one eSATA port, analog audio yield ports, an SPDIF optical output porthole, a PS/2 sequential keyboard and black eye porthole, and the requisite Gigabit Ethernet port wine. The motherboard as wel offers Bluetooth connectivity, and a button that clears the CMOS barrage–very W. C. Handy if something goes wrong while you're tinkering.

So what's missing? Bloatware. The system hosts a clean install of Windows 7 Last, and nil else. There's also no multiformat card reader, and the liquid-cooling reservoir on the face of the unit blocks all but of the disposable 5.25-inch drive bays, but I suppose one pot't necessarily have everything.

Is the Medusa nevertheless a good value? Draw a blank the lofty toll tag for a moment. Quick and dirty calculations put the parts listing at about $4715. Minimal brain dysfunction another $500 roughly for the barbs, reservoir, radiators, heart, cooling unstable, and tubing that goes into a liquid-cooling set out that's a little less truculent (you rear spend many, but unless you're serious about overcloking your RAM and graphics cards, it's unecessary). And past there's merchant vessels charges and nuisance tax.

Sure, those numbers are rough–you could probably do better on some parts, and get free shipping from sites like Amazon River. But if you were looking to build this rig yourself, you'd save nigh $1000 to $1500; certainly not a bad "fee" for a stalls overclock, super liquid temperature reduction, and not having to bang completely yourself.

I'm something of a hardcore PC gamer, merely this point of performance is leagues above anything I'd consider–better to economise for a fewer more displays and a few months' tear. Only the Jellyfish shows off what Primordial Computers is capable of, and it doesn't disappoint.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/469738/primordial_medusa_includes_the_kitchen_sink.html

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