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Management

Announcing Cadalyst All-Star Award Winners, Part 6: Xi MTower PCIe Workstation

3 Jun, 2007 By: Cadalyst Staff

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Today's spotlight shines on the Xi MTower PCIe.

Cadalyst All-Star awards honor the best of the best -- the most outstanding among all software and hardware products that earned Highly Recommended ratings from Cadalyst Labs in the past six months. Four software systems and five hardware products earned the latest Cadalyst All-Star awards, announced in the June 2007 of Cadalyst magazine. Today's spotlight shines on the Xi MTower PCIe workstation from @Xi Computer.

Dazzling performance numbers, moderate pricing, good warranty coverage, extensive expandability options and high-quality components throughout, the Xi MTower PCIe system earned its Highly Recommended rating when it ran in Cadalyst's first workstation roundup of 2007.

The tested MTower PCIe was based on an EVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI motherboard with an NVIDIA 680i chipset. The motherboard was housed in an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 2.93GHz processor with Silent Water Cooling, which was overclocked to 3.20GHz. The dual-core Extreme has a 4MB cache with a dynamic allocation feature that gives a single active core as much cache as necessary. The system included 2GB of DDR2 1,000MHz PC2-8000 RAM of a possible 8GB and two Western Digital Raptor 74GB hard disks joined in a RAID 0 configuration for a total 148GB hard drive capacity.

Graphics for the MTower PCIe were accommodated by the XXX version of the XFX GeForce 8800 GTX, which was based on the NVIDIA GeForce 8800, and incorporated a total of 768MB of DDR3 memory. AutoCAD scores on the Cadalyst C2006 benchmark were the highest of any system we'd ever tested at the time?and with no specific AutoCAD settings available in the graphics card driver.

• Link to Cadalyst All-Star Awards: The Best and Brightest for the full list of June 2007 software and hardware award recipients.

• Link to the full-length Cadalyst Labs workstation roundup, "Workstations on the Rise."