Introduction

Überclok is a relative newcomer to the OEM system market. We first took a look at them while reviewing their entry/midrange Ion system and we liked what we saw. Good component choices, an honest and straightforward website, solid tweaking, and stability all conspired to give us a warm feeling. In fact, their youth and relatively unknown name (areas associated with reliability and long-term support for the consumer) was the only major flaw we pointed out. Today we're reviewing their only other model, the high-end Reactor.

We've already covered the company and the website in our Ion review, and won't rehash it here. Both the Ion and the Reactor come with a number of well-chosen options you can customize, and in general we like this segregation into two product lines. In theory, it should allow Überclok to focus on providing the best possible performance from each platform without getting bogged down in minor details. Their website still shows refreshing honesty, from their descriptions of video cards to their new Blog, and it's clear that they keep up to date with the market and adapt their strategy and product lines as the industry changes. We were sad to see the loss of the Tuniq Tower as an option, but according to Überclok it was so heavy that even with their custom foam stabilizers (which of course add to shipping hassle and cost), it was causing an unacceptable amount of failures.

Specifications

The specifications below are for the system as tested. Our original review system actually shipped with a GeForce 9800 GX2, which seemed stable until we started doing some of the 3D testing and it began a rapid decline to the dead parts box. We contacted Überclok and they provided us with a GTX 280 as a replacement, which is an available configuration option on the Reactor. However, some recent changes have made the current Reactor slightly different from the review system shown below, which we will discuss in the Pricing section.

Exterior

Once again, the system arrived in a plain cardboard box with some Überclok stickers on it. The Cooler Master Cosmos S is encased within it its own product box and bag.

Nothing too interesting here - the case box is well cushioned and arrived undamaged. The owner's manual is still very well-done and a great addition at this price point. We do wish they'd include just a few performance benchmarks in the opening pages. Those results can serve as a baseline measurement, so if you find your system scores i.e. 10000 in 3DMark06 and the initially shipping system scored 12000, you know it's time for a tune-up.

Interior

The Cosmos S has a monster (200mm) fan on the side.

Wire management is reasonably good, as it was with the Ion.

The button on the Cosmos S is interesting - it's essentially just a depression on the case that's touch sensitive. Once you get the hang of it, it works reasonably well, though it's a little twitchy at times for our taste. It's difficult to see from the pictures, but the Cooler Master power supply has a nice mirror finish.

Setup and Startup

As we state frequently, systems that get shipped often need a little tightening and reseating prior to bootup. Both of the SATA cables in the Reactor became disconnected during shipment; once reconnected, everything came up without problem.

First, let's look at the BIOS.

The Reactor comes overclocked to 3.4GHz right out of the box (425 MHz FSB, 1700 MHz quad-pumped). Our temperatures are much higher than with the Ion, but this is completely different class of processor with two additional cores. Once again we see good attention to detail here, with increased core voltage and tweaked memory timings. First boot is good and clean, just the way an enthusiast would like it.

The desktop is clear, the number of processes is comfortably low for Vista, and there is a small amount of genuinely useful software installed. Detonator 175.16 drivers were installed, which were up to date at the time of shipment (we later installed 177.92 for our testing). We still feel some kind of antivirus package, like AVG Free, should be offered to the end-user as an optional install, but this is a minor point. After all, you can always download a trial/freeware AV package if you want it, and if you don't want it that's just extra time cleaning out the preconfigured system.

CINEBENCH R10

CINEBENCH places a heavy load on the CPU during the rendering tests and can utilize multiple CPU cores. The video subsystem has no bearing on the CPU rendering portion of this benchmark.

Impressive. The Reactor is keeping pace here with some much more expensive machines.

PCMark Vantage

In the past, we've used PCMark 2005 as one of our general performance tests, which uses a number of applications to simulate real-world system usage and provide a performance measurement. For the future we'll be updating to the Vantage suite that provides the same types of tests, some of which focus on the CPU while others also utilize the video subsystem. These tests include digital photo manipulation, webpage loading, video transcoding, HD content playback, and so forth.

SPECviewperf 10

We realize that not everyone out there is a gamer (Ed: Gasp! Say it isn't so…), and although these machines are intended for gaming, often the high-end hardware is useful for other purposes as well, such as CAD, artistic rendering, and medical software. SPECviewperf is a set of benchmarks that measure the OpenGL performance of packages such as 3D Studio Max, Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks, and other professional applications. The software is free to download and test on your own system, but be aware that running all the tests takes several hours to complete. We ran all tests at a resolution of 1280x1024.

We'll provide comparisons with other systems in the future, but the Reactor ran through the tests for hours with total stability.

3DMark Vantage

As we mentioned in previous reviews, Vantage is a new addition to our test suite to replace the aging 3DMark 2006, and though the new payment scheme is inconvenient, it is still user reproducible (once…). As a brief recap, Vantage runs on Windows Vista only, and has four different default test settings: Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme.

Obviously the extra GTX 280 in the CyberPower machine gives it a huge lead here, but the Reactor does very well, all things considered.

Crysis

Crysis is punishing to even the most recent PC hardware. This demo also has two built-in benchmarks in the "bin32" folder, one "CPU" and the other "GPU". We ran several configurations to show the scalability of this game. We ran all benchmarks three times, discarding the first result and averaging the other two. We ran all tests at "High" quality unless otherwise specified. Per Derek's recent findings, Crysis benchmarks were run with VSync at default settings (i.e. not forced off in the driver).

Looking at opposite ends of the spectrum here, we see that the CPU benchmark shows the Reactor on par with the SwordM, as did CINEBENCH. Remember, however, that Crysis is completely GPU bound at higher resolutions.

We see further evidence of the brick wall here even on the multi-GPU systems. With only one GTX 280, the Reactor can still pull out a reasonably good average framerate at 1920x1200, but for smooth play it'll likely need to stick to 1680x1050 or lower.

World in Conflict

World in Conflict is a strategy wargame where the Cold War has erupted into a full-scale conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The demo has a built-in benchmark under Options->Graphics. Quality settings in the game also modify anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering; however, these were controlled independently while all other settings were left at the default for High quality.

We see very nice results here for the Reactor. Wait a minute, too nice… We doubted our own results here and ran the benchmark several times in several different configurations, with the same framerates coming up. We suspect that the latest NVIDIA drivers have given significant performance increases to World in Conflict, which disproportionately skew the results here. We will update this article as we find out more information.

Power

We measure power consumption using a Kill-A-Watt device at the wall outlet. Idle indicates a measurement taken in Windows with no applications running. Max indicates the maximum power draw with the system fully loaded (running four instances of Prime95 and 3DMark06 simultaneously).

We can see that the Cooler Master power supply gives a lot of headroom for the current system configuration, which is a good thing.

Noise

We measured noise with a sound level meter, at distances of 24" and 48". The case fans and video cards dominate the noise produced. For reference, ambient noise was approximately 37.5 dB(A).

The Reactor does well here, scoring lower than two of the other high-end systems we've reviewed, even with the 200mm side case fan.

Temperature

We utilized CoreTemp 0.99.3 to measure CPU temperatures, which has incorporated the latest TjMax values for Intel processors. We loaded each core with Prime95 and ran Crysis in the background.

In our look at the Überclok Ion, that midrange system never climbed above 50C at full load. Here, we are almost at that point at idle, but this is a completely different class of system. We're satisfied with the load temperature and never experienced any stability problems whatsoever, but still find ourselves wondering what the Tuniq 120 could do….

Problems

After a minor SATA reseating on arrival (and replacement of the defective video card), this system was extremely stable throughout the suite of benchmarking. Another item encountered was that the Blu-ray/HD-DVD combo drive was extremely loud; it sounded like a jet engine spinning up. The disks used had no covers or balance problems and we tried several disks with the same result. The other optical drive was quite normal, so we chalk this up to a drive anomaly.

Pricing

Überclok has made some minor changes to the Reactor offering since we took delivery of the review system, including bumping up to the Q9550 and some changes to the hard drive lineup, in addition to now offering ATI video cards as an option. The system closest to our review configuration is $3230 at the Überclok ordering website. The closest that we came at Newegg with a very similar configuration was about $2350. The margins here are clearly higher than they were on the Ion, but so are the build times and tweaking, and the price of warranty extension on an overclocked quad-core processor.

Final Thoughts

Once again, we find ourselves pleased with Überclok and their Reactor offering. It's in a different market segment than the Ion, and as expected the attention to detail, choices of components, and most of all the performance and stability of the Reactor are all consistent with a system in this price range - or even significantly above it. The warranty period and price premium is comparable with competitors, and the system binder and attention to detail are areas where Überclok excels. Überclok produces a great product, and if they can establish a good reputation for service and support, they should become a top choice among the sea of PC system providers.