Next-Generation PCs

Voodoo Omen DCC A:221

Inside the window that takes up one side of the Omen's case, glowing purple tubes carry cooling liquid past our review unit's two 2.2-GHz AMD Opteron 875 dual-core CPUs and two SLI EVGA E-GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards to a radiator that is attached to the back of the huge, blue case.

Fluorescent light from built-in bulbs bounces off the mirrored surfaces and colorful components, giving the case the look of a tropical aquarium, especially with the room lights dimmed. All that's missing are the fish. And although it's not completely silent, the system runs with eerie quietness.

Given our review unit's impressive complement of hardware, which also includes 1GB of DDR400 RAM and two small (74GB) but fast 10,000-rpm Western Digital Raptor hard drives striped in RAID 0 for speed, we hoped for superlative performance scores. On WorldBench 5, Unreal Tournament, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the Omen DCC A:221 did indeed produce excellent marks--though not the best we've seen. On one of our advanced graphics tests using Doom 3 and Far Cry at 1600-by-1200-pixel resolution, however, we received a glimpse of what a high-powered system with SLI graphics cards can do: The A:221 was almost twice as fast as the quickest non-SLI machine in this roundup.

The gigantic, roomy case can accommodate two more hard drives, two more optical drives, and six more RAM modules, but we were surprised to see only one open PCI Express slot.

All in all, the Omen DCC A:221 is an impressive computer. But for $7995, you'll want to make sure you're running software that can take advantage of its doubled-up hardware.