Deluxe Power Pack

For supreme gaming power the TI Deluxe Power Pack is exactly what its name suggests. This PC blitzed our tests and also looks cool, with the chic black iCute case offering some nice cooling as well.

The stealthy black Gigabyte 8800GTX graphics cards looks stark against the blue Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3P motherboard, both of which are quality pieces of hardware. An Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz CPU sits at the heart of this machine with 2GB of DDR2 RAM at its side. Two 320GB Seagate hard drives in a raid 0 striping array make up the storage. As an added bonus the Deluxe also comes with a digital TV-tuner. All-in-all we had no problems during any of our testing. The TI Deluxe Power Pack comes with Windows Vista Home Premium installed, so it is one of the first to get put through the latest version of our benchmark software, WorldBench 6. This edition is built for Windows Vista, and pushes the capabilities of the latest machines.

In WorldBench 6 the system scored 99. The base system specifications for a score of 100 are only slightly higher than the TI Deluxe Power Pack, so a score of 99 is quite impressive. We also put it through a couple of gaming tests to see how the beefy Gigabyte 8800GTX graphics card held up. In 3DMark 2006 at default settings (1280x1024) with no anti-aliasing (AA) or anisotropic filtering (AF) the TI Deluxe Power Pack scored a whopping 9847. This score is fairly indicative of the 8800GTX graphics card, but is still nothing to scoff at, and will handle just about any existing game title at high-quality settings. We also ran it at 1680x1050, the native resolution of the included Chimei 22in monitor and turned on 8xAA and 16xAF, at which it scored 5852. Running the FEAR in-game performance test at a resolution of 1280x960, while using 4xAA and 16xAF resulted in an average of 110fps (frames per second), more than enough for smooth, quality gaming.

We also ran an MP3 encoding test using CDEX, a feely available application. Converting 53 minutes of WAV files to 192Kbps MP3 files took this machine 1min 51sec, a fairly indicative, but good result for the CPU. For the hard drives we ran a copy test, copying 4.12GB of raw data in varying sizes from one place on the drive to another. This took the system just 2min 46sec, or 24.81MB/s.

The gigabyte motherboard provides some good upgrade potential and only two of the four RAM slots are occupied. Up to 8GB of RAM can be installed and it is also CrossFire ready for dual ATI graphics cards if you decide to remove the 8800GTX. The TV-tuner takes up one PCI slot, but another is free, as are two PCIe 1x slots. A floppy drive and an LG DVD re-writer with dual layer support are installed as well.

The iCute case has a huge 250mm fan on the side of the panel blowing cool air straight on to the motherboard. This will ensure a cooler system but, combined with the perforated design of the case may end up allowing a lot of dust in. The 550 watt Cooler Master power-supply is the only means of hot air extraction, but it uses a 120mm fan to do so and resides at the top rear of the case.

Plenty of connectivity is available thanks to four USB ports and some audio ports on the front panel. Six analogue ports and two digital (coaxial and optical) audio outputs are available on the rear port cluster for surround sound. A further four USB ports can also be found on the rear panel, as is a FireWire port, a serial and parallel port and a gigabit Ethernet port.