General Hands-On Usage

Here's a CPU-Z screenshot showing some detailed specs of what's running under the V3 Avenger's hood:

And here's a GPU-Z screenshot showing the status for the graphics card.

With three GTX 480s in SLI, we definitely consider the Avenger a high-end system. Everyday computing tasks also proved pleasurable with this system. With not only a solid-state drive (SSD) for the operating system, but two SSDs in RAID 0, the Avenger makes Windows 7 feel lightning-fast. Programs opened and closed quite quickly, and our benchmarks reflected this supped up performance as well.

The overclocked i7 930 processor kept up with demand and did not experience any stability issues. A 40% overclock is no small feat, and V3 proved its tweaking mettle in this regard.

These configuration tweaks (the RAID-configured SSDs and OC'd CPU) provide a great deal of added value for the customer, and this "getting the most performance bang for the hardware buck" philosophy is one of the niches where boutique builders separate themselves from the mass-production outfits.

The Avenger comes with CyberLink's PowerDVD 9 installed, which is also 3D capable. We did not have one of the (rather limited) 3D Blu-ray titles available, but we did watch some 2D Blu-ray footage, which looked great on the 23" 120Hz capable ASUS monitor.

Boot Time

In a system built for speed such as the V3 Avenger, it should come as no surprise that it delivered a boot time of only 38 seconds.

Power Consumption

The Avenger consumes 302 watts of power at idle, hopping up to 605 watts under load.

Audio Performance

We ran this custom rig through the standard media encoding test regime here at TweakTown, which includes music and video transcoding.

All systems are tested "as is", which means operating systems and drivers can and do vary and some come pre-installed with applications that may or may not affect performance.

Any anti-virus or security applications are disabled and uninstalled before any testing is started, as they can affect test numbers.

For the iTunes encoding test we took the White Stripes - Under Great White Northern Lights album in MP3 format and encode it to AAC format using iTunes and time the results with a stopwatch.

The Avenger completed this task in 55 seconds.

Video Performance

For the movie-encoding test, we took the Microsoft Magic of Flight VC-1 WMV (1080p HD) video with six-channel audio and transcode it to XviD (1080p HD) with LAME MP3 two-channel audio and an MP4 container using MediaCoder 0.7.3.4616 32-bit edition.

The V3 took 67 seconds to complete this task.