MainGear Green Ion Gaming PC Unleashed
Hot on the heels of Computex 2009, luxury PC maker Maingear is launching a new system labeling it as "the world's greenest gaming PC". They're calling it the Ion Pulse - but it isn't Nvidia's Ion at all.
With green being the flavour of the week - in more ways than one - Maingear chucked a Zotac mini-ITX coupled it with a Core 2 Duo or Quad (s-Series) processor and choice of single HDD or SSD storage. Memory is limited to two DDR2-800 slots, but Zotac says you could slip in a couple of OCZ's DDR2-1066 SLI-profile memory sticks, even though they aren't listed on
Maingear's configuration options.
The twist is Maingear touts the Ion Pulse as having "upgradeable graphics", since the Zotac motherboard hosts a PCIe x16 slot where you can stick another of Zotac's 9600GT- or 9800GT ECO graphics cards. That way you can have graphics running off the discrete GPU (have cake) and PhysX processing on the mGPU (& eat it). Nice.
According to Maingear, total power consumption under load is under 145 watts, which equates to just about a little over a single Core i7 processor in full swing. The whole system weighs in at just 8lbs measuring a lilliputian 11"x7.6"x8.25". In typical Maingear fashion, the polished black case has been covered in cool techie schematics.
You can look it up on the Maingear site, the unit is available for shipping within 48-72 hours and starts at $800.
With green being the flavour of the week - in more ways than one - Maingear chucked a Zotac mini-ITX coupled it with a Core 2 Duo or Quad (s-Series) processor and choice of single HDD or SSD storage. Memory is limited to two DDR2-800 slots, but Zotac says you could slip in a couple of OCZ's DDR2-1066 SLI-profile memory sticks, even though they aren't listed on
Maingear's configuration options. The twist is Maingear touts the Ion Pulse as having "upgradeable graphics", since the Zotac motherboard hosts a PCIe x16 slot where you can stick another of Zotac's 9600GT- or 9800GT ECO graphics cards. That way you can have graphics running off the discrete GPU (have cake) and PhysX processing on the mGPU (& eat it). Nice.
According to Maingear, total power consumption under load is under 145 watts, which equates to just about a little over a single Core i7 processor in full swing. The whole system weighs in at just 8lbs measuring a lilliputian 11"x7.6"x8.25". In typical Maingear fashion, the polished black case has been covered in cool techie schematics.
You can look it up on the Maingear site, the unit is available for shipping within 48-72 hours and starts at $800.
