iBuypower Chimera 4-V1

Boutique manufacturer iBuypower is well known for its affordable but powerful gaming rigs, with the Chimera 4-V1 desktop being the latest example. Though its $2,499 sticker price may seem intimidating, consider that its two upper-end video cards are primed for action at even punishing detail settings and its CPU can power through any day-to-day or multicore processing application without breaking a sweat. The only thing open to debate is the design; some may find the fiery monster painted on the side panels "cool," and others may think it clashes with their decor. Whichever side of the argument you fall on, the Chimera 4-V1 is a hot gaming PC.

Design & Features
Gaming systems (including those from iBuypower) are typically loud and ostentatious in design. So it's no surprise to see that the side panels of the black Chimera 4-V1 are emblazoned with its namesake: a flame-wreathed lion head that looks like a second cousin to the Balrog from the Lord of the Rings movies. Some people around the Labs found the design tacky, though others appreciated its mythical intrepidness. If you have more sophisticated tastes, something like the Digital Storm ODE Level 3 ($2,399 direct, 4.5 stars), with its white Corsair Graphite Series 600T case, might be more your speed.

Located on the front of the Chimera 4-V1 are two USB 2.0 ports, headphone and microphone jacks, and a multiformat card reader (MS, CF/MD, xD, and SD/MMC) that contains another USB 2.0 port. On the real panel you'll find five more USB 2.0 ports and four faster USB 3.0 connections, eSATA and power eSATA ports for connecting hard drives, a PS/2 port for connecting an old-school mouse or keyboard, and a USB 2.0 port for use with the motherboard's BIOS Flashback feature. Connecting to the Internet will require use of the wired Ethernet jack, as there's no Wi-Fi, though you can add that yourself by installing a $20 card in the free PCI Express (PCIe) x1 slot. The two installed Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 video cards give you lots of display output options: two DisplayPort, two HDMI, and four DVI-I.

Opening the Chimera 4-V1 requires no tools; two thumbscrews hold each side panel in place. Care has been taken in the internal organization as well?wires are tidily routed below the motherboard, leaving a clean interior and improved airflow. A 120GB solid-state drive (SSD) and 1TB 7,200rpm hard drive fill two of the six hard drive bays, and a Blu-ray combo drive is installed in one of the two optical drive bays. Two SATA ports are available on the Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard for dedicated SSD caching, and there are three additional SATA ports for connecting any future optical or hard drives. Four of the eight RAM slots are occupied, giving the system 16GB of memory. There's a third PCIe x16 slot, too, but fitting another video card into it may be tough given the bulky GTX 570 and 1,000-watt PSU bracketing it.

Performance
With those two video cards and a powerful 3.2GHz Intel Core i7-3930K processor, the Chimera 4-V1 is ready for some serious gaming. It achieved solidly playable frame rates in both Crysis (67 frames per second, or fps) and Lost Planet 2 (117.9fps), in both cases at 1,920-by-1,080 resolution with high detail settings and 4x anti-aliasing. It surpassed the Maingear F131 Super Stock ($2,300 direct, 4 stars) by a significant margin in Crysis (47fps) and Lost Planet 2 (72fps), but fell short of the Digital Storm ODE Level 3's 71fps in Crysis and 121.7fps in Lost Planet 2.

The Chimera is also more than capable of chewing through day-to-day office tasks. In our PCMark 7 overall-system benchmark it scored 5,121, and it breezed through more media-oriented programs like Photoshop CS5 (needing only 2 minutes 42 seconds). But the ODE Level 3, powered by a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-2600K, beat it in both tests (5,825 in PCMark 7 and 2:21 in Photoshop). In the CineBench R11.5 rendering test, the Chimera 4-V1 earned a score of 11.64, higher than any gaming desktop we've seen in this price range.

The iBuypower Chimera 4-V1 is a powerful gaming desktop, and it comes at a fair price for the parts it packs. The Editors' Choice Digital Storm ODE Level 3 offers better performance, however, along with a no-fuss checkout system (you don't have to pick and choose your components) and a more aesthetically pleasing chassis for $100 less.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the iBuypower Chimera 4-V1 with several other desktops side by side.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/STlLwSMyKfw/0,2817,2398461,00.asp

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