Verdict: Poorly chosen CPUs and it's extremely noisy

The corporate logo of Real Machines is a black widow spider, aka Latrodectus hesperus, an arachnid made famous by its mating behaviour (the female often eats the male after intercourse), and the scene in 'Dr No' where a spider very nearly prematurely ends James Bond's espionage career. The Real Machines RX Alpha is quite an imposing beast but, in contrast to the black widow, its bark is worse than its bite.

The RX Alpha is built inside a Cooler Master Stacker, but unfortunately, Real Machines has made no effort to customise the case. The cavernous interior is dominated by the monstrous Tyan Thunder K8WE motherboard, which is based on the Nvidia nForce Professional 2200 chipset. The motherboard is big because it supports two Socket 940 CPUs and two graphics cards in SLI.

The CPUs are a pair of Opteron 250s, each running at 2.4GHz and, unfortunately, not overclocked. This is a rather strange choice of CPU, as a single Athlon 64 X2 4800+ would not only be cheaper and faster, but also easily overclockable. If Real Machines really wanted the RX Alpha to take advantage of its dual-processor motherboard then it should have supplied two dual-core Opteron 275s. Although this would have bumped up the price significantly, in the RX Alpha's current configuration there's very little benefit to having two single-core Opterons, especially as you'd have to ditch both CPUs before buying two dual-core Opterons in order to upgrade.

The graphics cards are a pair of XFX GeForce 6800 Ultras, again not overclocked. Although it doesn't provide any benefit right now, the Tyan motherboard has two 16x PCI-E slots, rather than the two 8x PCI-E slots found on nForce4 SLI motherboards. However, when more powerful graphics cards and more demanding games are available, the higher bandwidth of the dual 16x PCI-E slots should make a difference. There's a grand total of eight DIMM sockets on the motherboard, four of which are filled with 1GB Corsair XMS3200R registered modules. A total of 4GB might sound like overkill, but at least it means you'll never have to worry about upgrading the RX Alpha.

The CPUs and graphics cards are all fitted with a strange mixture of water- and air-cooling hardware. The CPUs are kept cool by an Asetek water-cooling system comprising a Hydor L30 pump and a single 120mm-fan radiator, plus a dual 80mm-fan radiator. Unfortunately, the graphics cards aren't water cooled and, as they're fitted with the Nvidia reference HSFs, they're very noisy. However, the noisiest component of the RX Alpha is the beastly SilverStone ENS-0565 PSU. It's rated at 650W, and has four separate 12V rails, rated at 13A, 18A, 16A and 8A, but it's almost unbearably noisy.

Other components include three 74GB Western Digital WD740GD Raptor drives in a reliable RAID 3 array on an XFX Revo32 RAID controller, yielding 148GB of space. There's also a 200GB Seagate Barracuda drive for archiving all of your other files. Two optical drives are included, an LG GCE-8525B and LG GCA-4163B. The former is a basic CD writer, while the latter is a dual-layer DVD burner. Audio is taken care of by the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS sound card and a set of Klipsch ProMedia GMX A2.1 speakers. As it's a 2.1 system, (two satellites plus sub-woofer), it isn't capable of surround sound, but it sounds great and is much more compact than the 5.1 and 7.1 systems bundled with the other Dream PCs. The input devices are a Logitech Corded keyboard and Logitech MX518 mouse. The Eizo Flexscan L887 monitor offers superb colour scaling and rock-solid images, but fast-moving games and movies suffer from ghosting and blurring despite its 20ms response time, which is a real letdown.

PERFORMANCE

The RX Alpha is no slouch when it comes to performance. Thanks to its two Opteron CPUs, it blazed through the multithreaded video encoding test with a score of 2.41, some 66 per cent faster than the Holly, which has a single-core CPU. Running several intensive applications at the same time is no problem for the RX Alpha either. In fact, Far Cry actually sped up a little (from 60.2fps to 62.4fps) while a CD was being ripped in the background.

However, it slipped into last place in the image editing and Far Cry benchmarks. That's not to say the RX Alpha is slow but, for just over £4,500, fast is not good enough.

CONCLUSION

While the RX Alpha is a perfectly respectable high-end PC, it isn't a Dream PC. It's built inside an unmodded and unpainted case, is very noisy and has no overclocked components. The choice of twin Opteron 250 CPUs is bizarre, as their performance is worse than that of a single Athlon 64 X2 4800+, and are considerably more expensive. They also make the RX Alpha almost impossible to overclock because it has to use server-friendly registered memory and a dual-processor motherboard.

Several other design aspects, such as the air-cooled graphics cards, also leave a lot to be desired. The Nvidia reference coolers are too noisy, as is the SilverStone ENS-0565 PSU. It also runs very hot, although it easily coped with our overnight folding stress test. The monitor isn't the best choice either, as its response time means that it isn't suited to displaying fast-moving games and movies.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro - Sound cards
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• Scan 3XS X58 Core i7 - Desktop PCs