The Vigor Force Recon QXN ($7,499 direct) qualifies as one of the more audacious systems I've reviewed, and that includes rigs like the Alienware Area-51 ALX and the HP Blackbird 002. It's a gaming system with an overclocked Intel Core 2 QX9770 Extreme processor, three GeForce GTX 280 graphics cards, and a boatload of storage space. Outwardly, the QXN looks like your stereotypical gaming box—huge and monolithic, with its metal case painted matte black. But is it the über-gaming system that its looks and name suggest? Read on.

The QXN sits in a huge black windowed SilverStone case, with space for many internal components. It makes good use of that room, as it is loaded to the brim with four huge hard drives, three mighty GeForce GTX 280 graphics cards in an SLI configuration, and a QX9770 quad-core processor (overclocked to 3.4 GHz). The hard drives combine to give the user an amazing 2.6TB of storage space, split among two 300GB drives in a RAID 0 array for the C: drive and two 1TB drives in a separate RAID 0 array for the data drive.

While I like having a data drive that holds your "digital life" (the pictures, videos, and music you use every day), I question why the data drives are RAID-connected. Files larger than 1TB are rare, and the drives that make up the C: drive are faster. If one of the data drives fails (physically), then all 2TB of data is hosed. It's better to keep the two 1TB drives separate or RAID 1 (mirrored for data safety). The RAID 0 array on the C: drive is okay, since the C: drive can be rebuilt fairly easily with the system's restore DVD. (Besides, on a gaming system, you'll be rebuilding your C: drive fairly often, since installing and uninstalling games and beta graphics driver revisions tend to make your system unstable.)

All these drives, graphics cards, and the cooling of the overclocked processor will take a toll on your ears. This system has the most fan noise I've heard on a recent gaming system. While all of these fans are necessary, the din is a bit much unless you have a pair of noise-canceling headphones or are willing to crank up the Razer Mako 2.1 speakers. With a gaming machine you expect to have some noise, but other gaming rigs manage to keep it to a low roar.

The QXN has one of the cleanest system builds I've seen on a gaming (or any) system lately: no unwanted programs (or crapware) at all. Crapware is an unfortunate affliction of some of the larger system builders, but smaller boutique shops like Vigor will leave all that stuff off if you want them to. The only things installed were the nVidia drivers, drivers for the integrated sound hardware, Acronis True Image (for restoring the system, as mentioned above), and a couple of test programs (3DMark Vantage and Prime95)—there because they were among the tests that Vigor performed before it sent the system out to me. And because the system starts out clean, you can return to this state using the True Image program.

All this is well and good, but does it translate into speedy benchmark numbers? In a word, yes. All of the Vigor's scores are competitive with those of other gaming boxes overclocked to 4 GHz. The Vigor was able to return a swift 74 frames per second at 1,280-by-1,024 resolution on Crysis. On World in Conflict, it returned a stellar 98 fps (1,280 by 1,024) and 65 fps (1,920 by 1,200). All three scores represent smooth playability. On Crysis at 1,920 by 1,200 resolution the QXN managed only 25 fps, not a playable speed,, but so far no system has been able to achieve the 60-fps score that we're looking for. It's certainly much better than the single-digit scores I saw earlier this year at the same resolution.

That said, there are systems that outperform the Vigor on the 3D benchmark tests. Though you would probably buy a much cheaper multimedia system to perform media tasks like photo editing and video transcoding, the Vigor excels at these tasks, as the system's Windows Media Encoder test score (32 seconds) and Photoshop CS3 score (18 seconds) demonstrate.

The Vigor performed a bit better than systems like the Alienware Area-51 ALX (Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX), the Polywell Poly i790SLI3, and the Falcon NW FragBox QX9650, but not quite well enough to overcome the system's price tag. Yes, you are buying a system with almost 3TB of drive space, but that makes more of an impact on a multimedia/video-editing station than a gaming PC. And although you come close to getting the fastest system, it still falls a bit short of the leader, the Velocity Micro Raptor Signature Edition.

So is the Vigor Force Recon QXN worthy? Yes, and no. It will certainly kick some serious butt and give you some great game cred; but its few near misses—namely, its benchmark test performance and astronomical price—hold it back. For almost $8,000 I want the highest performance numbers, and coming in second and third just won't do.

Check out the Vigor Force Recon QXN's test scores.

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