Page 9 -- Conclusion
Conclusion
This Firestorm isnt the best example weve seen from SmoothCreations. While the config was pretty solid, the parts were best in breed, and the Silverstone SG04-HF case was quite nice, but like the paintjob, the performance was a uneven. It just comes down to the heat of the i7 965 at 3.6GHz was just overwhelming. Those flames must have done something to the internals, as the machine could barely hang on to stock CPU speeds.
In ordinary use, Windows 7 on an SSD was quite nice to use. I might even say joyous, as a lot of SSD users can attest. Coupled with the Intel i7 965, evering was snappy. Anyway, SSD's pay dividends on level load times, which in this machine were amazing. It was fun waiting for clan buddies to load, and especially fun to already be in position and sniping spawns in Battlefield2: Bad Company 2, for example.
Performance wise, the Firestorm failed to dominate any benchmarks, even when we put the low-latency memory to good use. In Everest, the memory tests were pretty decent, offering low latency and bandwidth, but still couldn't match our benchmark, coming up second best to the regular i7 965. The disk tests were fairly phenomenal, naturally. The only issue being keeping the heat down so the CPU doesn't throttle, which it did quite often. On the upside, with the BFGTech GTX285, the Firestorm was always fast and smooth in all the games we played.
Of course, we would be happy to see a GeForce GTX series 400, GTX295 or an ATI 5870, but since the Silverstone case is limited to 22.8cm long cards, so it precludes those cards. An ATI 5850 would be a nice, lower power, option, and it's DX11.
So, the biggest problem with the Firestorm is the heat. It was difficult to isolate the problem, since the CPU cooler seemed ample enough, I think the problem stemmed from the PSU. The CPU cooler is a passive heatpipe design that relies on the PSU fan to suck heat out. This would be a nice and elegant design if the PSU actually spun up its fan to draw heat out, which in our tests, it didn't. In fact the PSU fans never spun up to more than a mere puff even though the warmth coming out of it was quite substantial.
I think the Firestorm is a fine machine as it is, but with the cooling problems, you probably can't have more CPU than an i5-750.
If you like this article please digg it. Leave/read comments on this product Sign up to receive a notice when we publish a new article Or go back to Guru3D's front pageEdit: As this goes live, SmoothCreations informs us that to fix the overheating problems they swapped out the PSU, added a third fan at the rear, and while you can still choose it on their page, the GTX285 is no longer available.
The Verdict:
Barely recommended, and wear your nomex.
Stuff that is Always at the End
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Our moment of zen:
BAM++
