PCAudioLabs Rok Box MC 7xs Preview

Before we bring this preview to a close, we figured we'd give you a short rundown of some performance numbers with the PCAL Rok Box MC 7xs.

PCMark Vantage, PCMark 7 and SANDRA General Purpose Computing and Multimedia Benchmarks

The Rok Box's PCMark Vantage and PCMark 7 scores are pretty consistent, comparably to each other.  The Rok Box MC 7xs took on the other big brand name rigs, with similar CPU and memory configurations, and bested them by a comfortable margin.  The reason for this is the Intel SRT SSD caching technology employed in the Rok Box.

In the PCMark 7 test we broke it out for you even further.  Here we set the SRT caching at two different levels: "Enhanced" and "Maximized."  In Maximized mode, the SSD caching will be most aggressive and in the event of hardware failure or power loss, you could lose data.  However, as you can see, there is a noticeable performance benefit.  PCMark tests generally favor system response times and overall bandwidth, versus say graphics performance (although that is a component of the test as well).  As a result, the Rok Box, well, rocks the benchmarks solid here.

Left to Right: SANDRA CPU, Multimedia and Physical Disk Tests

For a final quick and dirty test, we've fired up SiSoft's SANDRA.  In the CPU and Multimedia test (integer and floating point performance) the Rok Box drops in at about where we expected for a quad-core Sandy Bridge chip with Turbo Boost to 3.4GHz available.  What's interesting is the Physical Disk test, which shows the 500GB Seagate keeping pace with the other standard HDDs in this test, but when Intel's SRT caching starts to kick in (SANDRA employs sequential transfers), its read throughput skyrockets to almost 200MB/sec SSD-like numbers.

The PCAL Rok Box, as we've noted, is setup for handling multimedia production and playback with musicians and digital content creation professionals in mind.  It's easy to see, through PCAL's component selection, that this machine will perform well in the various usage scenarios that are required for this sort of work and play.  Further, this machine offers the horsepower, bandwidth and peripheral connectivity required for this sort of fun, in an extremely quiet chassis along with a very quiet, efficient cooling solution (come on, if you're in the music business, you almost can't call it "work").

We enjoyed our time with the PCAL Rok Box, so much so that we're going to be sad to see it leave the lab.  Ahh, but that's a pain we'll have to endure in an effort to "give thanks" to our valuable community members here at HotHardware.com.  We'd also like to thank PCAudioLabs for sponsoring the Rok Box MC 7xs in our November Giving Thanks Sweepstakes. If you'd like to build a Rok Box of your own, head on over to PCAL's Rok Box configuration page and dial one up.  You'll get an email from Jack notifying you that your system build has begun and then maybe you'll even get Fred in PCAL Technical Support reaching out to you to offer assistance, once you get your new rig home or in studio.  As Sly and the Family Stone once sang, "it's a family affair" over at PCAL.

All told, our experience with the product and PCAudioLabs was a complete pleasure.  Some lucky winner is going to take this bad boy home to rok out for their very own.