First Look at the NCIXPC Vesta X4 2050 SLI Feat. Cooler Master HAF 912 Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,078 words · ~5 min read
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So, we're having a look at another NCIXPC system. This is the Vesta 2050.
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So, last time we were looking at the 3050, and this one has some key changes.
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First of all, you can see the case is quite a bit different. This is a value
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gaming case from Cooler Master. This is the brand new Half 910. So, you can
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actually I wanted to treat this video kind of as a look at the 910 as well as
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as a look at this particular gaming system. It looks like Oh, shoot. It
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looks like I managed to unplug the uh DVI cable there. Oh, there we go. It's
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back. It's working. Awesome. So, you can see we're running a Mafia 2 benchmark
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here. You don't actually have to look at that cameraman, but I'm going to go ahead and take this off. So, we've got
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half. Okay. Half stands for high air
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flow. So, you can see the side panel here runs with either a 120 or a 140 mm
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fan on it. You've got all the amenities inside. So, you can run with uh let me
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see two 120s, two 140s, I believe, or
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you can run with that looks like a 160.
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So, you've got tons of 200, sorry, 200. So, you've got a ton of options in the
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top for air flow. You've got a 120 mm fan in the back. You've got two 120s by
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the look of things in the front. Or those might be
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92s. Let me see. Hopefully, cameraman.
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Two 120s. Two 120s in the front. All right. So, let's have a look at the
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system spec here itself. Actually, no. Let's continue to look at this case
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because there's a lot of cool stuff in here. First, you got support for two SSD
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drives natively. That's two 2 and 1/2 in drives. And then you've got support for
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an additional 1 2 3 4 5 six 3 and 1/2 in drives. So, you have a ton of storage
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options. You can also install an how
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many optical bays? Yeah, we've got four 5 and 1/4 in bays. You can see here in
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the front we've got only the one drive installed right now. You got all your usual front connectivity, reset, power,
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all those lights, and you've got the traditional half styling. Now, what's
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really sort of standoutish about this case is how solidly built it is for a
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value case. And I mean, Cooler Master's really done a great job with their half
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series overall. Everything from this is
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now the lowest end all the way up to the half. So, let's talk a little bit about
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the spec of this machine. You can see we've got a different architecture here.
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So, we're using instead of an Intel CPU, we're using an AMD CPU. This is an
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Athlon 2 X4, so we do still have a quad
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core, even though this is a lower price system at 749. We're using an MSI
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motherboard. Once again, this is an NF Force board because we did want SLI
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support. And it also features the new GTS 450. So, once again, is with the
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Cyclone cooler, so we're able to maintain that level of quiet. And
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speaking of quiet, we've gone with a C-sonic power supply this time around
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with an 80 plus bronze rating. This power supply is actually capable of
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powering two cards in SLI with this configuration, more than capable. And it
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runs dead silent because it's 80 plus bronze and it uses a quiet 120 mil fan.
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We've got a 500 gig drive in here for storage. And obviously you can upgrade
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it to an SSD or a bigger drive if you want. And the uh cameraman today is not
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a secret. It is actually our NCIX Ivan,
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the guy who runs our NCIX PC Facebook and actually does a lot of work on our
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PCs these days. And he wanted me to talk a little bit about Mafia 2. So we had
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the benchmark running, but there's a
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couple things that we wanted to touch on. First of all, tweaking. So at the
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default settings, we were able to get 29.8 FPS. So that's with physics on
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medium running on the video card. But there's actually a few things you can
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do, and you can get details on this on the NCIXPC Facebook page. You can
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actually tweak it so that you can turn off certain aspects of the fizz X such
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as clothing. So if you you don't turn off clothing, but if you turn off the
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fizz X on the clothing, the dynamic clothing on all characters, you can
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actually boost that up considerably to about 37 FPS. And if you're running 37
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FPS in the demo, you're actually getting a reasonably good gameplay experience.
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However, sometimes it's kind of fun to see the the clothing whooing around and
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explosions and stuff like that. So, if you only leave the clothing on for veto,
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and I mean the dynamic clothing, then you get around 33.3 FPS, which is again
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acceptable, but you don't have dynamic clothing on all the people around you.
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So, that's something that we wanted to talk about a little bit. Uh, bear in mind, this is the OC version that comes
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with this system. And there's also another note here. Yes, it comes with
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Just Cause 2. So, just in case you were curious, we have a couple Vantage
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benches here. So, with FsX turned off, it scores about 9,000 3D marks, which is
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pretty darn good for a system in this price range. And then if you turn FSX
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on, just in case you have an NVIDIA card and that's your point of reference, you
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can see the CPU score. CPU jumps way up
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and you get a substantially higher score. Although, this is the one that any Radeon users or older GeForce users
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are going to want to compare against. So, thanks for checking out our little showcase on the Half 912 as well as the
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Vesta 2050. And don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.