Systemax Sabre
Power desktop sacrifices frills to offer high performance at a good price.
Though the Systemax Sabre's price ($3700 as of October 6, 2006) may sound expensive, it's hundreds of dollars less than you'd pay for a comparably high-performance system from a boutique manufacturer like Alienware or VoodooPC. Such systems tend to cost in the vicinity of $4000 to $6000, making Systemax's Sabre seem like quite a bargain.
What's the catch? Systemax PCs are available only through discounter TigerDirect, which cuts a few corners to keep the price down. For example, there's no fancy liquid cooling system, so the system's fans are a bit loud. And while the shiny red tower case has the requisite stylish plastic front panel and Plexiglas see-through window, it lacks the easy-off cover, soundproofing, and other design touches found on more-expensive systems. The Saitek Eclipse keyboard, which resembles an oversize video-game controller, offers volume control but no multimedia or programmable keys. And on a high-end system like this, I'd have liked to see an optical S/PDIF Toslink digital audio connector and an external SATA connector.
But when it comes to core hardware and performance, the Sabre delivers. Equipped with Intel's top-of-the-line 2.93-GHz Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 CPU and an ATI Radeon X1900 XT graphics card, the Sabre posted the fastest frame rate score to date on our Unreal Tournament benchmark at 1280 by 1024 resolution. Its mark of 648 frames per second exceeded the average score of 484 fps posted by systems ranked in our
Not surprisingly, Return to Castle Wolfenstein played very smoothly in informal tests, but both it and Unreal Tournament looked very dark on the $200, 19-inch Hanns G flat-panel display that came bundled with our review unit. Small (6.8-point) text, on the other hand, was easy to read, though the edges of letters appeared a bit fuzzy.
Gamers will like the accompanying mouse, which feels solid in the hand and has pleasingly responsive buttons.
Once you remove the two screws that hold the cover in place, the Sabre's interior invites easy upgrading. Cables and wires rest in bundles, and access to all of the drive bays, expansion slots, and memory modules is unhindered. The system comes with two fast, 10,000-RPM Seagate hard drives configured in a high-performance RAID 0 array with a total of 300GB of storage space. If you want to opt for the safety of RAID redundancy, the Sabre's motherboard also supports RAID levels 5 and 10, and the easy-to-reach hard-drive bays have room for two more drives if you want to introduce additional capacity.
Documentation is virtually nonexistent; the only printed material we received was a motherboard manual, and most ports lacked any kind of labeling. But gamers and power users seeking speed and economy should take a close look at the Sabre.
Kirk Steers
