Previews - BEAST Computers' ultimate Intel Core i7 machine

[shaithis]

Crazy price but if they are targeting the millionaires out there, then good luck to them

[Tunnah]

*Points at Paul's avatar*...

just because he works at scan doesn't mean he knows i'm uneducated about em
been building systems now for nearly 10 years, with over 200 bought from scan themselves..altho sometimes i've been mighty tempted to just buy one of their prebuilds on my lazier days

[BeastComputers]

HI Guys,

First of all thanks to those who have left positive comments, and a big thanks to Hexus for taking the time to have a look at our system and photograph it.

As Hexus have explained, this is a pre-production model and a lot of the spec has already been changed since the PC was built. We are now using the second revision of the Para-flow chassis, with the third revision currently in development. On release the spec will be a lot different and A LOT cheaper

We must apologise at this point, as in the haste of getting the PC out for review, we did supply Hexus with the wrong information as far as the price was concerned. We cannot give an exact price of the system due to some rules still set in place but we are aiming to bring the system out for around the 4.8k mark. It seems that the 6k system was one specced with very expensive SSD drives and tons of other extras that does not reflect the final system.


It is difficult to pin a price on a system which is ultimately as cheap or expensive as you want or need it to be. The final system will just be a guide for people to add or remove what they want to. We never give anyone the hard sell; we never recommend things that people do not need. Some of our customers don’t really care how much it costs but we don’t see this as an opportunity to take the mick, we simply offer honest, un-biased advice.

We hate to have to justify the figures that our systems command as we work extremely hard to put them together, and out customers and clients work extremely hard to be in a situation to buy one of our creations.

There is more to our systems than just the components included in them:
The chassis and cooling alone costs a lot to produce - more than the average complete PC. A lot of work is done to it; powder-coating, aluminium laser cutting and fabrication, laser cut panels, mesh and acrylic inserts, heavy modifications to the original chassis structure and so on, not to mention the time taken to design and develop it.

Remember that our systems take days, sometimes weeks to build, and are normally built by the same person throughout pre-build, built and testing. Typically a Rig like this would take around 5 working days to assemble and cable providing all the necessary components and case parts are ready, and all cables have been braided correctly.

A day is spent preparing the raw chassis for powder-coat. 114mm holes are cut for fan/radiator holes, sections of the case are cut away for the Para-flow set-up, punching holes in the pre-fabricated aluminium parts to meet the specific placement of tubing. The whole lot is then sent off for powder-coating and laser-cutting and returned.

Once all of the components arrive back in the workshop the build will commence. It's not that it takes 4 days to build a computer. But we choose to spend around 4 days building it, cabling it and water-cooling it. A similar specified, air-cooled system in a standard case would probably not take very long at all if no such attention to detail was used.

What we do though, is similar to many enthusiasts work logs and system builds. We actually mod and build the systems with great detail. We are pretty good at it, and we can do it pretty fast.
The staff we have here at BEAST are much like you guys, We started off building and modding our own rigs; now we do it as our day jobs. The business has to make profit on the goods that it sells to pay the wages of our talented staff, to fund the over-heads and to cover our warranty and technical support side of the business. We are very aware that you can build computers for less than what we sell them for from separate components, it’s obvious! We encourage people to get out there and start making extreme modded rigs! We just provide a service for our customers who do not have the time to build research or troubleshoot a custom PC. Our customers want the best, so they come to us.



Our findings with i7:
Building a PC like this is pretty hard when you bare in mind that the Intel i7 platform was only released last Friday or so. Not everything goes as planned, there were issues with the LAN drivers with this early revision of the Intel board Which explains the use of the Killer NIC network card. Killer NIC’s are not a usual part of our standard system specs, but some of our customers who can make use of their features usually choose them.

We found that you have to forget a lot of things you know about Core 2 Duo/quad when dealing with this new i7 stuff. We, as well as others were surprised that the chip ran hotter than we had expected for this new generation of components. It's hard not to compare it to the socket 775 stuff but we must remember that it is a completely different kettle of fish.


However, the cooling system handled it extremely well; the fans which are set up on a T balancer can comfortably sit at low speeds to keep the system cool. There is in fact tons of headroom for large overclocks. Please see our other thread for more detail on the cooling system and how it works.

Water-cooling i7 is something we are pretty excited about at beast, and this is just the start of what is to come. With new, more suitable water blocks more than likely on their way I think we can expect to see some big improvements.






The i7 Rigs will not be available until the NDA on the chip has been lifted. We cannot give any specific prices on the rig until the lift. However, If you would like to be one of the first to have your tailored, fully blown, watercooled i7 rig please feel free to contact us to discuss and we will contact you as soon as the chips, and their final pricing is revealed to proceed with the build.

[Biscuit]

Interesting read thanks BeastComputer