Maingear RUSH SuperStock X99 Review: PC Gaming Like A Boss

by Dave Altavilla — Monday, May 16, 2016, 12:48 PM EDT

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Rush Far Cry Primal Perf, Power Consumption, Acoustics

Far Cry Primal is an action adventure game set in prehistoric times where your character carries out survival mode skills with melee weapons like spears, clubs, bows and slings. Developed at Ubisoft Montreal, it's good clean fun to be sure, and sports cutting-edge effects courtesy of the Dunia 2 engine.

Far Cry Primal Benchmark

Dunia Engine 2 Performance - DX11

Dunia 2 is only loosely based on the Far Cry engine and offers effects like global illumination, volumetric lighting, dynamic fire propagation, a realistic weather system, and realistic facial expressions. The engine supports Direct X 10 and Direct X 11 code paths and looks fantastic.

Far Cry Primal is a great looking game engine but unfortunately it seems NVIDIA either has some driver tuning to do or the game is heavily CPU-bound with our graphics configuration. As you can see, max and min frame rates are excellent, all the way up to 4K at Ultra image quality settings but FPS scaling from 1080p to 4K is virtually flat.

Total System Power Consumption And Acoustics

Tested at the Outlet

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet.

The above graph is about what we expected from the Maingear RUSH SuperStock. With it's loaded-for-bear configuration of three blistering-fast GeForce cards, a heavily overclocked CPU, 32GB of RAM, multiple high performance SSDs, as well as fans and water pumps all spun up under heavy workload, this nuclear reactor of a system draws well over 900 Watts of juice. Even at idle, the RUSH draw nearly 200 Watts. This is the kind of gaming PC that could annoy your neighbors and electric utility company with rolling brownouts--like a boss. And if you're into this kind of compute horsepower and over-the-top build quality, you probably don't really much care either.

With respect to the RUSH's noise profile, for its heavy duty component configuration and cooling setup with multiple water pumps, the system is relatively quiet. We've heard quieter systems to be sure but the RUSH maintains composure even under a stiff gaming workload. Things do tend to spin up when you drop the hammer in a triple-A title but in no way would we consider the system "loud" or otherwise offensive to the ear. You get what you ask for from this beast and it's a performance system first and foremost, however.