First week impression

 

About every three years since 1998 I've bought a new system.  The first was from Alienware when the first mega monster systems started showing up.  Anyone remember those?  I had the 3Dfx Voodoo2 12MB SLI for a whopping 24MB of graphics power.  That was a very solid system and had no problems.  In 2001 I bought a VooDoo EGAD with the first GForce 3 cards (before NVidia SLI) and that was when the problems began.  Voodoo decided to ship the system with a Gremlin.  That little bastard corrupted my memory which I had to swap out.  It next tried to destroy my graphics card with IRQ Driver blue screen errors and other various crashes.  Even after I swapped out the card with a GForce 4 the problems came back a few months later.  I ended up giving that system away hoping to be rid of the Gremlin but it just decided to hide in the kitchen lights until my next system arrived.  2004 was the Falcon NW Mach V.  I got one of the first NVidia SLI systems with two 6800 Ultra cards.  On the second day of playing Counterstrike, the Gremlin decided to destroy the power supply.  I sent the system back hopping the Falcon guys would find and kill it but they were unable to as I suspect it can make itself invisible.  They replaced the power supply but there was a little jitter in the display after the system returned.  I first thought the Gremlin was in the monitor jiggling the screen but after I re-seated the graphic cards in opposite slots the jitter went away (go figure).  The Gremlin must have been trying to pull the cards out but I still can't figure out how he swapped slots on them with the panel shut.  Anyways, no problems for 3 years until the card in slot 2 died.  Fortunately my warranty was still good for another month so Falcon sent me a new one.  Gremlin, however, killed that card 2 weeks later.  I was running on only one 6800 Ultra card when Conan was approaching release.  I then decided to buy from AVA due to price/component selection reasons.  Since it was going to be a few weeks from order to arrival and my Conan game was sitting on the fireplace mantle, I couldn't wait any longer and ordered a 8800 GTS 512MB for the Falcon.  Even though my CPU is probably bottlenecking it, I was still able to play Conan with Medium settings at 1280 x 1024 at about 50fps avg.  I did have to scale down some draw distances though.  Of course Gremlin had to screw with that by giving me an NVidia Sentinel message saying the card wasn't getting enough power.  I have an Enermax 600w supply in there so I know it's the creature messing with me again.  Last night on the AVA system I got a blue screen error playing Conan but still too early to tell if it's the game, gremlin or system.  The hall light by the front door started to flicker this morning so gremlin must be up there chewing on wires, so I'm safe for the time being. 

 

The AVA system was well built.  Way better than the Falcon.  Falcon bundled and tied the cables but AVA's build just seems tighter and better organized.  Booted right out of the box with no issues.  There was a red glow coming from the front that scared me but my wife told me that it wasn't a Demon and was just the LED on the front fan.  Graphic drivers up to date.  Surprisingly the most quiet system I've ever owned.  I love that Noctua CPU fan and the fan on the GX2 isn't as loud as I thought it would be from the reviews.

 

From the first week impression I'd have to say that I'd order from AVA again.  I just wish they were closer to the west coast so ground shipping wouldn't take so long.  Also, if anyone has a way to permanently destroy a Gremlin (ant insecticide doesn't work) please post this information.  Don't worry what people will think of you.  Even if your wife says you're paranoid and makes you take a pill every morning, Gremlin's do exist!  Information on how to destroy them should be shared.