Submitted by ck on January 12th, 2006

Facts

Hemos "reviewed" a gaming system provided to him by monarch computers.

Commentary

This is yet another blatant slashvertisement, and not even a competent review. Half of the article sounds like it was copied straight out of Monarch's promotional material.

One of the first things that should be acknowledged is that this version of the Nemesis is a very high end gaming machine. The price for the system that I had been testing was over $5000. There's the scary-fast base system itself, but then you throw on full THX surround sound, the customzied keyboard and mouse that Monarch produces - and while you are talking about top-dollar, you are also talking about top performance.

[ed: snip full system specs]

All Monarch PCs include: 48-72 hr. Burn-in Diagnostic (to ensure all components are malfunction free); Latest BIOS, drivers, and tested patches installed (All drivers are also included on CD); award-winning assembly and installation including tie-off on all cables (for improved airflow); final 62-point inspection by Intel and AMD Certified Technicians, and Free Unlimited Phone Support. All manuals, disks, cables and other accessories included with your retail components will be included with your system.

Hemos, we can save you some time: next time just write, "$COMPANY paid me to write a fluff piece on their product." All you have to do is fill in the name of the company.

As is fairly obvious, the machine's specs are pretty hardcore. In doing some of the standard testing, the system turned out a 3DMark05 test of 13,002 whichout missing a beat. Similarly, the Sysmark04 score was a studly 225. To be blunt, I don't think I've ever seen those types of numbers before - in real life, that is.

Ah, finally- proof that the copy wasn't written by Monarch's marketing department. It's full of grammar and spelling mistakes that only a Slashdot editor would let slip by.

Next we have the irrelevant and made-up benchmarks:

DivX encoding was also quite fast - 1574 seconds on the sample size that I used.

What was the sample size? Which encoder? At what settings?

Playing Doom 3, with all graphic options cranked (including the console accessible ones) this machine still turned out a 80.2 FPS. Turning off the console options, and just going in ultra-mode had a frame rate of 87.3, sustained. My other gaming obessions, World of Warcraft (Props to Ajul-Nerub server!) managed to turn in a more paltry 77.3 FPS

He mentions running Doom 3, but why no results from a well-known timedemo, so that someone could compare the performance to a different machine? The screen resolution isn't mentioned once in the entire "review." He gives even more vague results from World of Warcraft. Where was he— MMORPGs have wildly different frame rates from place to place.

He suggests that RAID 0 is a good solution for backups. The quoted system specs:

Hard Drives: 1 x Western Digital 74 GB SATA 10K Raptor (WD740GD), 2 x Western Digital Caviar SE 250 GB SATAII 16MB Cache 7200 RPM (WD2500KS)
RAID Setup: RAID 0 (Zero) Setup

And Hemos' thoughts on RAID 0:

One of the other features that I liked is the fast primary drive, and back-up, slower, but RAIDed drives. It's nice for installing high access demand apps on the primary, but using the other drives as storage drives.

...and doubling the failure probability on your long-term storage?

He guesses at how airflow works, rather than doing any testing:

The other comment I would make, speaking as an obessive wire organizer, is that the machine itself ships very very nicely tied off cabling-wise. I think this looks nice, but also, I would suspect, makes a appreciable difference to the heat flow.

Besides the double "very" above, he (in proper slashdot editorial form) included obvious spelling and grammar mistakes in the published article:

"the customzied keyboard and mouse"
"the system turned out a 3DMark05 test of 13,002 whichout missing a beat."
"My other gaming obessions, World of Warcraft"

Any reputable gaming or hardware site would test the system under different loads and attempt to compare the system to competitive products. Hemos just throws out some numbers with no context with a sprinkling of Monarch fanboy and tells people to go buy the product. Luckily, there are plenty of comments on the article pointing out his mistakes.

---

More injustices by Hemos
Injustices Home