Maingear Potenza SS: A Cool, Quiet, SFF Gaming PC

Name: Maingear Potenza Super Stock Small Form Factor Game PC Review
Brand: Maingear

by Joshua Gulick — Thursday, March 14, 2013, 01:00 PM EDT

Next, we ran Batman: Arkham City and then brought Hitman: Absolution into the fold. Both games offer DX11 gaming modes and advanced graphics technologies, including tessellation.

Batman: Arkham City

DX11 Gaming Performance

Batman: Arkham City follows the aging Batman: Arkham Asylum and brings with it updated graphics. We turned on Nvidia PhysX and cranked the detail to Very High.

With Batman, the Potenza found itself competing with the Revolt for the top spot, posting the highest frame rate at the 1024 x 768 resolution. But, it virtually tied the revolt at 1280 x1024 and then struggled to keep up at 1920 x 1080, the highest resolution we tested.

Hitman: Absolution

DX11 Gaming Performance

Our final game benchmark of the review is of Hitman, the blockbuster series that follows an assassin as he finds himself go from hunter to prey. Here we have no other systems to compare it to as yet.

The frame rates in Hitman: Absolution won't stun anyone, but they're playable at the lower resolutions. The benchmark routine makes use of Hitman: Absolution's support for Global Illumination, which provides realistic lighting, but also hammers on NVIDIA-based graphics cards. The benchmark shows a throng of people watching fireworks in crowded city square.

Tags: core i7, SFF, Asus, Corsair, Mini-ITX, Maingear, Ivy Bridge, H77, Potenza, gtx 660

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.