e@Pc Annihilator Series 7
The Annihilator came in as the least expensive machine at only $3499. e@Pc tried a few different things to shave the total price of their PC. Like Peripherals Plus, e@Pc also decided to submit an AMD 1.4GHz processor, but they decided to use an MSI motherboard that only supports SDRAM. Again this would have dropped the overall price a little but it didn't slow down the machine that much. There was no modem or network card but again these don't really cost that much anyway. That said, e@Pc decided to include a second 30GB IBM drive, which they decided to stripe. Thanks to this, the PC managedthe highest score in Business Disk and High-End Disk tests.
The system case stands quite tall and all the components inside the case were well arranged. The two 30GB IBM drives were separated by one free 3.5in drive bay. A 5.25in drive bay also separated the Pioneer DVD-105 drive and Ricoh MP7083A writer. This just made it easier to get to these drives and it also would have kept them cooler. The Ricoh writer was only able to burn standard CDs at 8x and burn re-recordable CDs at 8x. In the CD-R/DVD Playback test we managed to successfully burn a audio CD and watch a movie without many interruptions. We did experience short pauses at the start of the burn process--pauses that did not last any longer than a few seconds. During the burn process we did not experience any glitches, not even when the writer was closing off the burn session. Again these guys did what Hallmark did where they made sure the DVD player and CD writer were set to run on separate channels. The hard drives were also plugged into their own separate channels. e@Pc did not have to use a PCI RAID controller like Hallmark because the MSI motherboard features RAID onboard.
Inside, a separate cover protects the area around the CPU, and under this cover was a large fan, which was supposed to blow hot air away from the CPU, and another fan at the front of the case, but neither of them worked.
The E@PC machine came with a 17in Velta flat screen CRT. It handles resolutions up to 1600 x 1200 but we do recommend you use this display at 1024 x 768 for the bset results. At high resolutions the screen tended to flicker quite a bit even after we had set the refresh rate. The sound card was a Terratec DMX Xfire 1024. This card is awesome--it's just a pity it was paired up with the disappointing MS-898 Multimedia Speakers.
The Annihilator didn't actually post any performance speed records (other than in the disk benchmarks). Its scores in Content Creation Winstone and Business Winstone were very good. It was fastest in Business Winstone and third fastest in Content Creation Winstone. Its 2D graphics scores were excellent and we saw how AMD machines have a definite edge in this test over Intel-based machines. It was a different story, however, in Quake 3. The e@Pc machine could manage only 133 frames per second at 1024 x 768. These were pretty much the same frame rates that some of the Intel machines were getting with the Geforce 2 Ultra cards.
We should note that we had a few problems running 3D WinBench on this machine. This PC shipped with the 10 series nVidia drivers. With these drivers we could not get this machine to run 3D WinBench at all. We then decided to install the latest 12 series drivers, which actually let us run the tests. We only managed, however, to get a score of 161. All the machines that were submitted made use of the 12 series nVidia drivers. The 10 series drivers actually give you a few more extra settings you can play with. For example you can disable v-sync in all Direct 3D games and benchmarks. For all the latest nVidia driver releases we recommend you goto www.guru3d.com/download.
e@Pc Annihilator Series 7
Company: e@Pc
Ph: 1300 65 62 65
Price: AU$3,499
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