So, with the new WoW patch forcing our hand, my lovely wife let me get a new desktop as an anniversary present. We left work early, went to Best Buy and got **this** dropped it off at home and went to our favorite anniversary dining place, The Melting Pot. It was (as always) an amazing meal, great wine, fantastic dessert (white Chocolate Crème Brule fondue) and back home….the next morning (since the updates and installs ran all night thanks to Comcast) the system was ready….I started up WoW just to see that it was working. The opening cinematic is amazing (in normal Blizzard style) but when powered by a 1gig video card on a 65” TV, vs the first time I saw it on a PC that had trouble playing a YouTube video without locking up every few seconds….it was awe-inspiring.
After the cinematic, the normal Ts &Cs pops up where you have to agree not to be a douche bag…..and something is wrong. The mouse is frozen. The background is still running so I know it’s not a lockup….but the mouse is just stuck. 9 hours later I’m back home from work and fighting with it, then I finally found the answer in a help forum. So I changed the default Win 7 Text size from Large to Medium, and it worked. So, I start it up, load my character, and wait anxiously for the .2 seconds it takes for the load screen to finish. and I’m speechless, it’s beautiful, smooth, crisp, and I can actually see that I have a head and arms (which were not really visible on the old desktop). Other people run by instead of blink across the screen…..I check the stats, running at max settings across the board, and I’m running so smooth it’s like a dream. So we played for several hours, and for the first time, we were not getting logged off or having critical errors, or losing connections. It was awesome.
Later after my wife went to bed I gave the system a little stress test. While running WoW in the background, I started running a YouTube video, started a system scan, and playing a little music in the background…..and I checked the task Manager….and I’m just barely topping 40% system use….Awesome! I was originally thinking the 1ghz DDR3 vid card and 800mhz RAM would need to be upgraded to the newer versions….but if I can’t even hit 50% on maxed stats now, I don’t think Cataclysm could possibly cause me any lag.
The Good; this PC is awesome, holds a high frame rate, has good stats, and is a very surprising machine coming from Best Buy… 10 USB ports (WIN),
The Bad; the keyboard and mouse that come with the system are crappy, it calls them a Gaming Keyboard and Mouse….but the generic ones you get from Dell feel much better. Only one disk drive, and it’s not a blueray. Has a powersupply fan, and a CPU fan, but no Case fan...I may be putting one in in the near future.
The Ugly; Best Buy has a few junk programs loaded in it, a Best Buy App, and some junk virus scan, I replaced the Anti-Virus and added in some needed driver, and it feels much cleaner now. If you have problems, I heard some nightmare stories about trying to deal with Asus Customer Service so just take it back to Best Buy if you have issues. I also heard about a lot of wiring not properly seated in their ports, and I did see that the power cable was not pushed the whole way into the hard drive, but that was an easy fix. So if you pick this up open the case and check the wires first.
Out of 10, I’d give it an 8.5. the lose wire has me a bit suspicious, and the keyboard and mouse are almost useless. I’d love to have the RAM and Vid card upgraded to the newest available speeds, but as is it is producing good speeds….I’d say if you can’t afford a big name manufacturer with an i7 chip set, you can’t do much better for the $850 price tag.
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