Maingear EPIC RUSH With Radeon R9 290X Crossfire

Name: Maingear EPIC RUSH With Radeon R9 290X Crossfire
Brand: Maingear

by Joshua Gulick — Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 09:32 AM EDT

When you’re working with a gaming system, high power consumption is to be expected. But there are major differences in the amount of power different systems draw, even (and maybe most importantly) at idle. So, it doesn’t hurt to know how your potential rig would stack up to other, similarly configured PCs on the market.

The Maingear EPIC RUSH pulls about as much power when idle as we expected it would, but the system surprised us when we fired up Prime95 and FurMark, two heavy-duty benchmarks. Where the iBuypower Chimera (which included an AMD FX-9590 processor and two AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards) pulled 637 watts under the same load, the EPIC RUSH pulled only 594 watts. Intrigued, we replaced Furmark with 3DMark 11 and the power draw kicked up to 762W.

Noise is probably more important to most gamers than power consumption. We’ve experienced more than our fair share of loud systems, but many of the rigs we’ve reviewed lately are surprisingly quiet. With its liquid cooling and large case fans, the EPIC RUSH is one of the quieter gaming rigs we've come across. At idle, the sound is negligible. Under load, the system just whispers.

Tags: Intel, core i7, CrossFire, Asustek, Haswell, NASDAQ: INTC, RAID-0, (NASDAQ: AMD), (NASDAQ: ASUUY)

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.