Digital Storm Marauder review: Good gaming, little else - wolfesaper1974

At a Coup d'oeil

Adept's Rating

Pros

Good gaming functioning; terrific, functional chassis
Lots of acclivity potential

Cons

Subpar general performance
Inevitably more connections

Our Finding of fact

For a budget desktop, this bare-bones system offers little beyond its frame rates.

Digital Force's Marauder gaming desktop is perfectly named, but for all the haywire reasons. The only thing this system is loss to plunder is your bank account, and IT wish leave little to show for the pillaging. Faithful its pattern, the Marauder is decently geared for gaming given its budget entreaty ($999). And if you'atomic number 75 buying the Personal computer simply Eastern Samoa an low-priced gaming system, you'll do fine. Just in nearly every other respect, this system suffers from critical deficiencies that make it less imploring for general use.

Performance

In our critical review unit as configured, a 3.1GHz AMD FX-8120 Zambezi processor and 8GB of memory serve as the brains and heart of the system. Still, with a less-than-impressive scotch of 77 happening our WorldBench 7 suite of tests, the Marauder barely had a pulse, as it was thoroughly bested away comparably priced, Intel-driven budget desktops such as the $999 Asus Essentio CM6870 and its WorldBench 7 score of 106.

Gaming is the Marauder's specialty, though. Armed with a Radeon HD 7700 graphics board, which launched in February of this class and uses a single 28-nanometer "Mantle Verde" GPU, the Marauder pumped out 80.4 frames per moment on our Dirt 3 benchmark (1920-by-1080-pixel resolution, high quality). On this test, the Marauder straight scaled as inebriated as 2560 by 1600 and maintained playability, achieving a frame range of 52.6 fps. Our Crysis 2 benchmark is a tad more demanding: The Marauder was competent to extend it at a maximum playable resolving of 1928 by 1080 (steep quality), hitting a value of 42.8 fps.

In gambling, at to the lowest degree, the Vulture trounced the aforementioned Essentio CM6870, which eked out only incomplete the Predator's frame rate happening the Unimproved 3 benchmark run and looked completely overwhelmed by its trip out through with Crysis 2.

Features and connectivity

But when I say that gaming is this system's only aglow spot, I mean information technology. The single 500GB petrified drive in this motorcar is a low-end alternative even for a budget screen background, especially when lined up against the full 2TB of storage that the Essentio CM6870 bestows. And that's not even the worst item on the Marauder's specification weather sheet: This Digital Storm desktop sports a simple DVD combo drive, whereas Asus manages to tamp a full Blu-ray actor into its sub-$1000 system.

We're big fans of the Marauder's lovely Corsair Retribution C70 chassis. The military theming carries well across the olive-green soma, up to and including a reset switch (with a finger-flip spread over) that makes you feel a little like you'rhenium taking the country to DEFCON 2 instead of power cycling your system of rules; the case's convenient carrying handles and side-board latches are a nice touch too. We love the fact that we don't make to twiddle screws to pop off the case's windowed OR self-coloured sides, even if it's a bit loud to coiffe so. Ii side fans, two battlefront fans, and one rear fan circulate air around the Marauder's interior, but you can add two more on the sheath's top—or a liquid-cooling radiator—if you privation to modification up the cooling.

You'll find lot of room for upgrades within the Marauder, and the Vengeance C70 makes that process as smooth and streamlined As possible. The system's three 5.25-inch bays (two of which are free) habituate built-in locking mechanisms to secure your components sans screws. The case prat hold a total of six hard drives, and easy-to-lock, slide-out trays transform the process of adding and removing storage into a task you can measure in seconds, not minutes.

A single PCI Utter x16 slot remains free on the motherboard (we'd use it to put in other art board in CrossFire), alongside one open PCI Express x1 expansion slot and deuce PCI slots. Thumbscrews secure the Marauder's PCI-founded components in place, a practical but imperfect solution for a case that's almost entirely get laid-on the loose.

The biggest drawback of the Vengeance C70 incase is that it allows for only two USB 3.0 connections along its presence. Four would have been better, and we even could give inhabited for a mix of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports. The system's rear is more USB-friendly, with ii USB 3.0 ports and six USB 2.0 ports joining an optical S/PDIF connection, a gigabit ethernet port, and connections for 7.1 surround sound. The Marauder's Radeon HD 7700 graphics room supports one DVI-I, one HDMI, and two Mini-DisplayPort connections. In total, the Marauder presents an average mixed bag of connectivity; a bit more, and some superfluous diverseness, would have been pleasing.

Digital Tempest didn't include a mouse or keyboard with our system arsenic reviewed, only you can select from a variety of options when customizing a system on the party's site.

Stern line

You'd have to be a jolly evangelistic gamer with barely a budget to work with for Digital Storm's Piranh to appeal to you. Integer Storm has recently upgraded this system to include an AMD FX-8150 processor, so the CPU performance should be marginally, but not substantially, better. Other, there's little about this $999 gaming desktop that similar systems don't exhaustively squash. Unfortunately, at the bottom, choosing a Personal computer often involves a tradeoff: You get great general performance or good gaming, but seldom both.