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Click Here to view the Claymore
D90G's specifications.
Scottish Highlanders are legendary for their use of the two-handed broadsword called a
claymore. A rather unwieldy weapon, the claymore could only be mastered
by the most excellent of swordsmen.
Aberdeen's 1.2GHz Athlon box
exhibits similar strengths and weaknesses. This modern-day Claymore
cleaved through several of our tests but also had problems with benchmarks
that require the finesse of a fencing foil.
{Note: Due to time constraints and product scarcity the Claymore
D90G was forced to use the 32MB Gladiac GeForce2 GTS. To
improve the gaming performance of your Claymore we
suggest that you use our Custom
Configurator and change out the video card for the MaximumPC
suggested GeForce2 Ultra card. }
Aberdeen based the Claymore
on a new Abit KT7A-RAID motherboard that uses VIA's new KT133A chipset.
Basically a refresh of the KT133 chipset, the "A" adds support for a
266MHz frontside bus. Aberdeen armed this bus with a 1.2GHz Thunderbird
Athlon, which makes for a winning combination. The Claymore posted a
phenomenal score of 218 in SYSmark 2000, a benchmark that gauges how fast a PC
can race through action scripts in a dozen popular Windows applications.
We've seen faster scores from custom-built, not-for-public-consumption
machines (for example, our last Dream Machine project hit 235, and an AMD
reference box armed DDR memory hit 238), but the Claymore did indeed take the
SYSmark title from other OEM-built machines, besting the HP Pavilion 9720's
score of 205. This HP system runs a 1.2GHz Athlon, but uses a 133MHz
bus. The Claymore also slew all comers in our Photoshop benchmark, just
edging Dell's latest Pentium 4-based system.
But just when we thought
the Claymore would cut a swath all the way to the land of Kick Ass, the
machine showed signs of fatigue. its 12x Creative Labs DVD-ROM drive
could only muster a score of 21x in CD Tach-that's far shy of the 30x average
read speeds that you'll get from today's 16x DVD-ROM drives. The
Claymore's gaming scores were also woefully lacking. The machine's 32MB
Gladiac GeForce2 videocard can't compete with the GeForce2 Ultra and Pro cards
that have appeared in recent review machines. For example, HP's 1.2GHz
machine comes with a 64MB GeForce2 GTS Pro and hit 100fps in Quake III.
The Claymore, meanwhile, only hit 59fps. Doh! In our Direct3D benchmark,
the Claymore lagged behind even 1GHz Athlon-based machines (at least those
armed with GeForce2 GTS cards).
We couldn't definitively judge the
performance of the Claymore's 150GB RAID array because our hard drive
benchmark continually crashed. We won't blame Aberdeen because HD Tach
isn't certified to test RAID arrays. We do know that dual 75GB IBM hard
drives offer awesome real world performance when striped together in a RAID 0
config.
The Claymore comes complete with a Sound Blaster Live! Platinum
5.1 card, a LiveDrive II bay, and Midiland's rip-roaring 8200 5.1 speakers.
Although this isn't the best set-up for quad channel gaming, the speakers,
combined with Creative Lab's DXR3 MPEG2 decoder, can turn the Claymore into a
mini movie theater.
The Claymore's sharpest edge may be its Sony
CPD-G500 monitor. Boasting a virtually flat screen and 0.24mm grille
pitch, this 21-incher employs much of the same Trinitron technology found in
the Sony F500-one of Maximum PC's all-time favorite monitors.
The
Claymore is the fastest PC we've seen so far in Windows applications, but its
sup-par gaming performance left us baffled. We'd have substituted the
12x DVD-ROM drive with a pioneer drive and switched out the GeForce2 GTS for
an Ultra card.
--Gordon Mah Ung
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Imagine Media All rights reserved
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