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Review: Primordial's Medusa packs plenty of power but lacks polish |
July 16, 2013
If you live in a world where you can afford to drop $9556 on an enormous, water-cooled gaming PC with four (four!) discrete graphics cards, I envy you. But if you’re thinking of taking the plunge with Primordial Computers’ latest gaming machine, the Medusa, I’d encourage you to look before you leap.
As befits its name, the Medusa is a monstrous computer, with clear tubing snaking through its interior carrying neon-green-tinted coolant. The CPU and each of the system’s four (four!) GPUs have corrosion-resistant nickel-plated water blocks bolted to them. Apart from the absence of a custom paint job, the Medusa is the epitome of excess, with strips of LED lights festooned around the interior of its gargantuan Corsair Obsidian Series 900D Super Tower case.
ROBERT CARDINPrimordial erred in failing to create some kind of mechanism to support the four Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan video cards that endow the Medusa with the power to crush gaming benchmarks.
But before I dive any deeper into this review, allow me to explain why the Medusa lacks polish: Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titans are heavy in their own right. Add 10 pounds of nickel-plated cooling blocks distributed among the four, link them together for quad-SLI operation, and you end up with a behemoth. If one card sags, it pulls the other three along with it. And that’s just what happened as the Medusa sat in the PCWorld Labs: The video cards began to droop to such an alarming degree that we wedged a piece of Styrofoam beneath them to keep them from falling out of their PCIe slots.
Considering that the Medusa is a custom-built rig, Primordial should have come up with an attractive brace to support the cards and take the strain off of those slots. And that wasn’t the only thing to go south (pun intended) during my evaluation. An LED strip glued inside the case fell off right before we packed the machine to send it back to Primordial.
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Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043936/review-primordials-medusa-packs-plenty-of-power-but-lacks-polish.html#tk.rss_reviews
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