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Systemax Warhawk AMD Athlon 64 Based Nvidia SLI ready Gaming Computer

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006 | Desktop Computers, Reviews

Systemax computers are known more for their value for money than extreme computing power and gaming performance. Well, it only takes time before the two come together. The Warhawk is a Systemax computer based on the AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor that’s designed for gaming. It comes up well against most games and is good value for money for those looking for a little kick from a pretty standard computer.

The Warhawk itself is just one of the standard setups of the Systemax computer gaming range. Everything is customizable and you can chop and choose the parts as you wish. This gives you the ability to up those parts that are more important to you and to downgrade those ones that you would rather upgrade later.

The 3500+ processor will do for most people’s systems, and for my liking I would go for this one. You need to add about $150 dollars to get the slowest dual core AMD X2 or a 3800+ version. The FX-60 chip will add $1000 dollars to the price.

The video card will do the trick, but if you do intend to do some serious gaming I would suggest upgrading to the 7900GT graphics card. Not only will it increase the performance quite a lot, but you can also upgrade that to an SLI setup in the future if needed. Doubling up of the standard card will limit future upgrades as you would have to replace both cards.

Select any of the Corsair memory options to get the most from your system. The most simple is very standard Corsair memory, but for only $5 more it provides some peace of mind that your system is good to go. 1GB or memory should be enough for anyone’s needs.

For data storage, single, RAID0 and RAID3 options are available. I tend to stay away from RAID0, which stripes information over 2 disks. When one disk fails, data is lost. The bonus is that it is very quick as it can write or read from either disk, whichever is closer to the information at the time. RAID3 provides parity and so the failure of anyone of the 3 drives can be tolerated, but there is the overhead of the parity writes. RAID0 is the faster choice, but less fault tolerant.

The rest of the system offers all sorts of extras that you can opt to upgrade, or in many instances, choose to leave out. Overall, it’s a nice looking sytem and is an easy way for you to get a fast gaming system without having to search around for all the different parts yourself.

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