Puget Systems Deluge Mini: The Art of Custom

Gaming Performance

It's at this juncture that we'll get to see if the extra cache and Hyper-Threading on the i7-2600K has any noticeable impact on performance (comparing the otherwise identically-clocked Origin Genesis with Puget Systems' Deluge Mini). We'll aslo get a better look at how this comparatively inexpensive gaming configuration (two GeForce GTX 560 Ti's in SLI) fares against NVIDIA's flagship GeForce GTX 590.

In certain cases that were already CPU-limited, the extra logical cores on the i7-2600K seem to help, but it's at this juncture we should point out a vital difference in how these systems were tested. At our standard 1080p testing, the Origin Genesis was using NVIDIA's 267 series drivers while the Puget Deluge Mini used the older 266 driver; these machines were tested concurrently, and it was actually with the Deluge Mini that we discovered just how dire the situation was for NVIDIA Surround. On 266.66 Surround just plain didn't work, but we didn't discover this until after we'd completed our 1080p testing for the Deluge Mini.

When we went to test the Genesis, we updated to the beta 267 driver right off the bat, which is likely what's causing results in Metro 2033 and STALKER to skew somewhat. This is also a good time to remind you that all of our tests are run thrice to ensure variations are weeded out. Interestingly, the 266 driver actually ran substantially better in Metro 2033 at "High" than the updated 267 driver (and of course now there's a new 270 beta driver available).

I can't stress this enough: for many of these gaming machines, running at 1080p (even with anti-aliasing) the GPUs are overkill. The two GTX 560 Ti SLI systems essentially bunch up, with Hyper-Threading either producing a gain or taking its cut and the driver difference making its presence known in STALKER, where abnormally high results in the "Night" benchmark skew the average. Let's move to surround gaming to remove the CPU bottleneck.

Finally, our surround testing continues to show freakishly favorable results for the Origin Genesis in STALKER, while in every other test the systems essentially fall in line. This is really where multi-GPU solutions shine and we hope to continue adding to these results in the future, but it's also a crime that getting NVIDIA Surround to work properly is as fraught as we discussed in the iBuyPower LAN Warrior II review. Those issues occurred across the board on all of these systems.