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Breaking the Mold.
We may have left the beige box concept back in the ‘90s, but boring designs still plague the PC industry. Intel’s YDI contest successfully challenged resellers to be different, bold, and inventive.
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The editors here at RAM admire any reseller who steps up and has the gumption to question his or her everyday designs and attempt to come up with something better that’s more specifically tuned to client needs. It’s not easy to break routine and do something beyond the norm. With five categories to choose from, there was an opportunity for anyone who deals with desktops to exercise their creativity. In many cases, the results were surprisingly original.
“The whole intention here was to drive awareness with our customers, to get them thinking outside the box, to get them building something new and innovative with different form factors in different categories,” notes Intel channel manager Jason Saganski. “The contest made customers give a little more scrutiny to what they’re doing, and hopefully it made them look again at what their customers might want. Odds are good that what the judges find cool and useful applies just as much to their customers.”
Apparently, not only did resellers get thinking, they also got more interested than some expected. Intel received several messages from people challenging why this or that system won in its category when another contestant was clearly superior. Everybody has an opinion, and it’s good that many people felt strongly enough about the content to get worked up about it.
What I and the rest of us at RAM have tried to do here is dissect each winner and discover why it won. What makes it special? Most importantly, how did it apply innovation in order to better reach a buying public? Because if there’s no lesson for us all to take away, much of the contest’s point will have been lost.
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Want to Play? Gotta Pay.
Building one of the fastest-ever PCs for sale requires not only a deep understanding of the enthusiast sector’s needs but also some extreme ingenuity for solving its problems. Vigor invested loads of resources into the elements that made its winning Colussus design possible.
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Dual-Socket Extreme (“Skull Trail”)
Winner: Vigor Gaming Colossus
The DX5400S motherboard broke a lot of rules breaks several rules in Intel’s play book, maybe the first of which is that desktop motherboards only have one CPU socket. This unit, commonly called Skull Trail, is essentially a 5400 chipset-based graphics workstation platform respun with all of the overclocking amenities craved by enthusiasts. The product is unique in the market and practically begs to have a unique solution wrapped around it. Every monkey with a screwdriver knows that the board was meant to be run with a pair of Core 2 Extreme QX9775 chips, which are retagged Xeon parts. How do you take an already extreme platform and push it to the edge?
Vigor Gaming’s Colossus pulls out all the stops within the confines of an 11-bay full tower, including four 10,000 RPM hard drives, 8GB of fully buffered DDR2 memory, and three NVIDIA 280 GTX cards configured in 3-way SLI—a fairly rare achievement in its own right. Now, top-end GPUs are infamous for kicking out loads of heat, and three of them cranking in the same air space as two 3.2 GHz CPUs overclocked to 4.0 GHz runs a real risk of at least crippling overclockability if not sacrificing system stability.
“The most innovative element of the system is definitely the A.T.O.M.I.C. VGA cooler,” says Thomas Gribble, product manager at Vigor Gaming. Apparently, the meaning of the acronym is still a secret since the product hasn’t officially launched yet. “We put a lot of time into creating this device and we are only using very basic thermodynamic principles to accomplish what we were trying to do. For every successful attempt at a product there are maybe five others that fizzle and die, so its always nice when one works the way you imagined. We hope to be able to bring the cooler to market soon so we can share the benefits with others.”
Combining heatpiping and an exhaust fan within a sealing enclosure that isolates the graphics cards from the rest of the system, the A.T.O.M.I.C. cooler makes sure plenty of cool air flows between cards. At the same time, Vigor employed its own Gaming Monsoon III LT CPU coolers, developed for the Core i7 long before the CPU launched. (Note how one exhausts toward the top panel fan and the other to the back panel.) The Monsoon coolers make a point to the industry that if you have properly-designed air cooling, the complexity, cost, and risk of water cooling isn’t necessary.
With the components selected, the biggest challenge remaining in creating the Colossus was packing enough power into the case. Picking a Thermaltake 1200W PSU was only part of the answer. According to Gribble, there are more cables in the system than any other Vigor has ever made, so creative cable management was a must. In fact, the amount of innovation required from top to bottom with the Colossus was relatively huge, so kudos to Vigor for setting the bar in how system builders can excel beyond convention to deliver something incredible for customers.
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Ship Shape.
The CruiZer will probably never make it to Wal-Mart, but as an example of how a reseller can customize off-the-shelf parts to fit a customer’s exact desires, this geeky design makes for terrific inspiration.
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Ultra-Small Form Factor
Winner: PA Computer Connections Space CuiZer
As a former Star Wars fanatic, I have to admire the work done by PA Computer Connections on its modded Millennium Falcon. The system is based on Intel’s Mini-ITX D945GCLF, which uses the 4W, 1.6GHz Atom processor 230. Now, this board probably won’t make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, and it may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts. (Told you I was a fanatic.)
A DVD/CD combo drive mounts on the left while USB ports adorn the right. A 300W power supply tucks in right behind the glowing ship engines. I totally dig that the communication dish sits atop a WiFi adapter antenna and the top gun turret hide an 8mm exhaust fan. Turning the laser cannons into hard drive LED activity lights is very clever. Best of all, nothing is glued in. Everything from the 120GB hard drive to the 1GB of DDR2 memory can be easily upgraded.
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I Dream of TV
The Trogdor machine won the consumer/media category for its innovation, not its sleek, highly integrated looks. While users will probably need to source their cartridges from eBay, this system screams appeal for dorm students who only have space for one screen yet still crave multiple ways to be entertained.
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Consumer/Media
Winner: PA Computer Connections Trogdor the Terminator
PA Computer Connections wins with going retro yet again, this time turning to the legendary Atari 2600 gaming console. I’m sure junior high-age boys everywhere will be burning to copy the Trogdor dragon design from the PC’s side panel onto their homework binders, but the real allure here isn’t the DG33TL motherboard, Q6600 processor, two hard drives, or 2GB of DDR2-800 memory. Nor is it really the NVIDIA 8800GT graphics for regular PC gaming.
No, the real allure is the Atari console mounted into the top 3.5" drive bay, with a slit cut into the custom case’s topside clear panel for game cartridges.
“The Atari 2600 in the computer was definitely both the most innovative and the biggest challenge,” says PA Computer Connections’s Christian Keilback. “It took over two weeks of soldering in between work, alone, just to get it working. I ran into a few problems when making it—like when you switch off the Atari, the whole computer shut down. So I routed the 12V line through the switch instead of the ground, and that fixed that problem.”
Keilback says he came up with the idea not only to feed his own Atari addiction but also as a conversation piece and a way to reclaim an AC outlet. The Atari can connect directly to a TV or loop back into the system’s TV capture card. While I don’t see this box going into the home entertainment centers of refined 40-somethings, the same concept could be applied to more home theater-friendly cases. It’s the imagination of blending modern gaming, classic gaming, and TV that appeals here. Spin it how you will, the Trogdor idea is hot.
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More Bang for the Buck.
The Extreme Gaming System might have been considered cutting edge many months ago. The config is an example of how to employ yesterday’s chart-topping components for speed while leveraging some of the cost savings of time.
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Extreme Gaming
Winner: MPECS Inc. Extreme Gaming System
OK, me personally, I’d like to see a Nintendo 64 mounted in this bad boy, but what do I know? And honestly, Vigor’s Skull Trail system can slaughter just about any other gaming rig you’d think of. So I wondered for a bit about the appeal of this MPECS config, and it finally came to me: A system like this is quintessential mainstream enthusiast. I know that doesn’t quite mesh with the “Extreme” theme, but let’s think about it.
MPECS went for the CoolerMaster Cosmos case, a very sleek, sexy chassis featuring (among many other things) six handled internal drive sleds. The foundation here is Intel’s DX38BT (BoneTrail) motherboard. These days, the X38 is growing a bit old in enthusiast circles, but the board still part of the Extreme Series and supports 45nm CPUs with up to 1333 MHz bus speeds. Thus choosing the quad-core, 3.0 GHz QX9650 makes good sense, and coupled with a Zalman 9700-series CPU cooler, the system stays respectably quiet.
Aside from the CPU(s), the key points in most gaming systems are graphics and storage. MPECs ties together two ATI HD 3870X2 cards with CrossFire and connects them to four monitors, enabling a huge, wrap-around gaming environment. (Add to this superlative audio from Creative’s X-Fi Pro card.) Obviously, the 4870X2 cards are newer, but for a mainstream enthusiast, having four of the prior generation’s fastest GPUs all working in tandem is still plenty wicked.
I’ll give props to MPECS for being the only contest winner that did something interesting with its storage implementation. Not content to simply use four Western Digital 150GB Raptor drives, the builder configured them in a RAID 0+1. This type of array stripes data across two drives for maximum performance—essentially a RAID 0—then mirrors those two drives onto the other two drives as a RAID 1. This way, there’s no parity computation involved to slow things down.
Add in a Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W to fuel all this horsepower and you’ve got a config that will knock the socks off of 90% of today’s gamers but not knock their wallets into the middle of next week.
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A Better Business Case.
The vPro platform is often thought of as being part of a $399 or $499 bland box, something businesses can deploy by the dozen. MPECs challenged this, showing that vPro machines can still be stylish while emphasizing value-adds like improved storage.
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vPro-based Business
Winner: MPECS Inc. Intel vPro Corporate System
The whole idea behind a vPro system is that it’s meant to be deployed in mass quantities. You would think that this means having a system as bland as possible: plain case, basic motherboard, minimum specs, etc. It just has to have a Q-series chipset to enable all of vPro’s remote management and other features. I’m guessing that MPECS went with the DQ35JO motherboard rather than one of the newer Q45-based models because it’s submission predated the Q45 release. So keep in mind that the Q45 enables Active Management Technology 5.0 as opposed to the AMT 3.0 found on the prior Executive Series generation.
MPECS actually offers two quad-core vPro configs, one using the DQ35JO in an Antec Sonata III tower and the other using the DQ965GF in an Antec desktop. My guess is that most businesses will want a desktop format, although the judges picked the tower system as the winner. (Again, what do I know?) Either way, picking Antec is smart because, unlike most faceless business boxes, Antec offers tasteful, attractive styling and solid build quality for a reasonable price.
Both MPECS configs place a pair of 320GB hard drives into a RAID 1, which is very smart for a business machine that can’t afford downtime or data loss. The desktop plants 4GB of RAM into play whereas the tower uses 8GB.
When it comes to vPro, I believe the platform itself is where most of the innovation happens. Simply being able to offer remote management services to your customers is groundbreaking. Compared to that, most things you can do with the hardware seem minor. The MPECS solution deserves praise for taking extra steps on performance, aesthetics, and data protection. Think along similar lines for your own commercial systems.
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