Verdict: It's the fastest and most beautiful PC in the world ever. Do you have the strength to resist?
The wait, at last, is over. After more delays than Connex South East, the Athlon 64 has finally landed in our eager hands. But we couldn't let this auspicious day pass without an equally auspicious system worthy of the hype. Who better, we thought, than Canadian master craftsmen Voodoo PC to make it shine?
This being Voodoo, there's no messing around with HSFs - both the 2.2GHz Athlon 64 FX-51 chip and the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra graphics card are kept cool by a gloriously green liquid-cooling system. Then our Canadian friends added two 512MB sticks of PC3700 RAM to the Asus motherboard, before icing our rather crunchy cake with two Western Digital Raptor S-ATA hard disks set up in a RAID 0 array. Oh, and a 250GB Western Digital hard disk for storing data. If your mouth isn't watering by now, you're reading the wrong magazine.
IF YOU WORK FOR INTEL, LOOK AWAY NOW
AMD can waffle on all it likes about future proofing, but we want some serious performance today. This may be a 64-bit processor, but - unless you're using Linux - it's going to have to perform in a 32-bit environment until Microsoft sorts out its 64-bit version of Windows. And that isn't likely to appear until next year at the earliest.
How, we asked anyone who cared to listen, would a 2.2GHz chip compare to the Pentium 4 when it comes to real tests of real things that real people do today? First, we should introduce the previous fastest system we've ever seen: our Beat the Office PC. With its 2.6GHz Pentium 4C chip overclocked to 3.54GHz, 1GB of Corsair XMS 3500 TwinX memory and a pair of RAID 0 Western Digital Raptor S-ATA disks, it scored 1.85 overall in our benchmarks. Not bad.
We originally thought that the chances of a 2.2GHz chip challenging our 1.85 score were slim. But the Voodoo PC laughed, kicked sand in the P4's face, then went off to buy an ice cream so it could stick out its vanilla-ridden tongue. 'Take your 1.85 and stick it up your jumper', the F1 snarled, before breaking the 2.00 barrier with a score of 2.02. That's twice as fast as our 2.4GHz reference PC!
Let's talk some more figures for a second. Where the Office PC took 256 seconds to rip our 14 MP3 files, the F1 took just 225 seconds - a 12.5 per cent increase. In Paint Shop Pro, our test completed in 300 seconds, that's 50 seconds faster than the 3.54GHz Pentium 4 office machine.
In fact, the only area where the Pentium 4 beat the F1 was for DivX encoding, and even then by a paltry 1.7 per cent. And even this victory was hollow, as when we overclocked the Voodoo it went 3.9 per cent faster in the video-encoding test and no less than 18 per cent faster overall.
Not that you'll be able to overclock most Athlon 64 systems. After all, first samples of new chips rarely overclock well and AMD tends to cut closer to the nail than rival Intel. But after much playing and tweaking, we were delighted to squeeze another 110MHz out of the F1 by squeezing up the bus speed. Nice.
Voodoo doesn't forget the gamer either, with its liquid-cooled GeForce FX 5900 Ultra overclocked to 500MHz core and 900MHz memory. It stormed to a 48.6fps frame rate in Wolfenstein, a healthy sign that this PC will kick gaming arse for years to come.
YOU'RE SO VAIN
Fortunately, the F1 isn't just terrifically fast: it's also a thing of beauty. The attention to detail Voodoo offers is sensational, with the entire set-up painted in glorious Lamborghini yellow (if that doesn't float your boat, you can choose from eight colours when you order). We're not just talking about the case either: the mouse, keyboard and every square inch of the monitor are finished in the same colour. Co-ordination is key!
This attention to detail even extends to the see-through side panel. Forget Perspex - this is solid glass. And we can see why Voodoo doesn't wish to hide away its work. The liquid-cooling system, with its vibrant green tubes, deserves to be seen. Your mates will go a similar envy-induced shade when they see it.
The only disappointment is that you usually can't see the liquid rushing around inside the tubes. The single sign that it's doing its work - other than the fact the machine doesn't crash - is the unending stream of hot air that emerges from the fan at the PC's rear.
Voodoo matches the classy spec with an equally classy set of peripherals. Top of the list is the 22in CRT monitor, which produces a sharp image even at 1,600 x 1,200. Just watching the demo of Wolfenstein on this monitor is a stunning experience, with vivid colours and the sheer amount of space on offer. But things get even better when you switch on the sound. Voodoo bundles the superb Klipsch 5.1 speakers for the best soundstage we've yet heard in the Custom PC Labs - they easily drown out the slight hum of the F1's three fans.
We were similarly impressed to see the fastest DVD rewriter on show - painted yellow, naturally - behind the front fascia door. This can burn DVD+R discs at 8x, which means a whole disc will be filled within around nine minutes. Not that you'll be able to find out immediately, as 8x media is more difficult to find than a weapon of mass destruction.
Voodoo's final, irresistible touches are a high-quality cordless Logitech keyboard and mouse (the MX 700 to be precise). We found the mouse absolutely fine for games, but you might want to keep a wired mouse handy for comfort's sake.
BUT THERE MUST BE SOME
THINGS YOU DON'T LIKE?
It feels wrong to nitpick when an amazing system like this comes into the Labs. It's light years ahead of anything we've seen from a British company and deserves every second of the standing ovation we saluted it with each morning.
But there are a couple of buts. The first is a complete lack of connectors at the front (although you can rectify this by ticking the Voodoo Digital Card Drive when you order) and just one optical drive, ruling out disc-to-disc copying.
And the kind of people that complain to John Lewis because their real wood fitted kitchen has knots in the wood (it's called a natural product, folks) might also moan about the occasional smudge of yellow paint on the back of the front fascia panel.
More importantly, anyone who enjoys tinkering with the insides of their PC is probably better off with something else. All the motherboard's PCI slots are filled as standard, and adding more memory looks nigh-on impossible as the radiator blocks access to the DIMM sockets. And as AMD is going to change the Athlon 64 FX-51's pin count from 940 to 939 in a few months time, you can forget about processor upgrades unless you're willing to throw out the motherboard as well.
Our final note of caution regards the liquid-cooling system itself. Now, call us paranoid, but that's a lot of water near a lot of electronics. If it starts to leak - and this is plastic, after all - there's only one place where that water's going to go.
CONCLUSION
So, you see, we can be balanced! The thing is, though, we absolutely, fundamentally, unreservedly love this PC. The hardware alone is phenomenal, but Voodoo hand finishes it in a colour of your choice. And it's the only Athlon 64 we could overclock.
Okay, we're willing to admit the Mesh machine is a far more sensible buy, as for £1,499 less you get almost the same speed. But the Voodoo isn't meant for the penny pinchers, and in its own way it offers great value. You're buying a hand-finished work of art, not just a PC.
