Polywell Ignition X7900i-3960

The year's most scorching gaming machines on the market tend to arrive hot on the heels of Intel releasing a new flagship processor, and that's certainly true of 2011. In the wake of the debut of the Intel Core i7-3960X, manufacturers are falling over themselves to put out the fastest, most decked-out desktops that anyone living on a trust fund will be dying to have. One such system is the Polywell Ignition X7900i-3960, a $4,599 (street) behemoth bearing the smoking new processing and enough other new hardware to send the most trembling enthusiast into flights of ecstasy. And, oh yeah, it's fast, too. But if you're spending over $4,500 on a desktop, you undoubtedly want the speediest, best-designed, and most feature-packed one you can get. For its numerous virtues and outstanding performance scores, however, the Ignition X7900i-3960 is not quite that.

Design
At least the Ignition X7900i-3960 is an eye-catcher. Its full-size tower case is cast in gleaming, glossy white with sharp accents that give each part of it a uniquely striking appearance. A band of silvery metal wraps around the top and the bottom, though it's interrupted on the latter with a black plastic ventilation grille. You'll find a similar grille at the bottom of the front panel: It's covering the intake fans and is in turn covered by a series of shiny black fins. This look, in turn, is replicated on the top panel; on the two side panels, you'll find the black grille as well, albeit without the fins. The rear panel is solid black metal, though cut with many hexagonal holes for ventilation.

Both the side panels eschew thumbscrews in favor of a key-and-knob locking mechanism. The knob is found on either side of the rear panel: Turn it one way to free the panel, which you can then just pull away; turn it back the other way to secure it shut; or use the keys (on our model, attached via a twist tie to one of the ventilation holes) to prevent anyone from getting into the computer. It's a somewhat bulky and inelegant system, but it works.

Features
Dashing as the Ignition X7900i-3960 may be in the attractiveness department, it's what's inside that counts even more?and there's a lot. In addition to the Core i7-3960X processor cooled by a sedate-looking, Polywell-branded fan?and?heat sink combo, plugged into the Intel Desktop Board DX79SI is a whopping 32GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 memory. Because Intel's new X79 Express chipset supports quad-channel memory, this is divided among eight DIMMs, and there are no free slots for putting in more. (Not that you'll need to upgrade anytime soon, anyway!) Video capabilities come courtesy of two video cards using the Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 GPU design, the fastest the company makes. This gives you an enormous amount of graphics potential, but requires a lot of power?thankfully, this is provided by a 1,250-watt power supply. All these internal components are cooled by four fans: one 150mm for intake, located at the bottom of the internal drive well, and three for exhaust (two in the top panel, one in the rear panel).

There's plenty more to be found on the front panel, too. Let's start with the two optical drives: one LG "Super Multi Blue" model that combines Blu-ray playing and DVD recording functionality, and one traditional DVD?RW drive. In another of the 5.25-inch bays you'll find a multiformat card reader. This leaves two bays free, and from them you can directly access the internal storage, all without having to unplug any SATA data or power cables. This gives you 240GB spread across two 120GB solid-state drives (SSDs) and an additional 3TB hard drive.

Only when you get to the collection of front-panel ports do you start to see what you're missing: One eSATA, three USB 2.0, and headphone and microphone jacks flank the power button on the top edge?that's right, no USB 3.0 ports. You'll only find two of those on the rear panel, joining six USB 2.0 ports, two Gigabit LAN jacks, a FireWire port, and S/PDIF digital and 8.1-channel analog audio ports for connecting speakers. Another nice feature is the "back to BIOS" button, which lets you safely roll back any changes you make to your system's configuration (such as overclocking).

A Logitech Cordless Desktop X100 keyboard and an associated OptiMouse complete the hardware side of the spectrum. Two warranties, one for three years for parts and one for five years for labor, should keep you decently protected.

Performance
Any performance tweaking you may want from the X7900i-3960 you will have to do yourself: Polywell has provided no out-of-the-box overclocking for it. The good news is that because the rest of the system?s components are so advanced, you still get amazing frame rates. But overall performance isn?t going to compare with what you?ll see on an overclocked system such as the Falcon Northwest Mach V that uses this same CPU and many similar components?with one big difference that further accelerates its gaming prowess.

That would be its setup of three Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 video cards, which let it deliver results that surpass those of the Polywell. We saw this in every gaming test, whether PCMark 7 (6,154 versus 5,990), 3DMark 11 (6,505 versus 6,148 at the Extreme preset), Crysis at 1,920 by 1,080 with Very High details (75 frames per second, or fps, versus 73fps), or Lost Planet 2 at 1,920 by 1,080 with High details (168fps versus 122fps). And the Falcon Northwest?s overclocking helped it excel at non-gaming tasks, too (on the off chance you?ll ever want to do them), again trumping the Polywell in every match-up.

So if you?re looking for the best Core i7-3960X gaming machine you can find, right now the Editors? Choice Mach V takes the prize?in addition to superior performance, it also gives you more storage space (with the help of two 256GB SSDs), a more forward-thinking case design, and a more adventurous motherboard loaded with features (including a lot more USB 3.0 ports) that Intel?s doesn?t attempt. But it?s important to note that the Mach V also comes with a faint-worthy $6,899 price tag. The Polywell Ignition X7900i-3960 offers an incredibly compelling alternative for $2,300 less, with most of the same pluses and only some minor minuses. The only way it will disappoint is your hunger for speed can only be sated by the most tip of the top desktop out there.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS

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