My Review (finally)

  Before ordering my rig, I did a lot of research to find the best balance between price, service, and quality among high end computer builders. I looked at all the larger companies like Dell, Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Voodoo, Cyberpower and others. What initially caught my attention with Digital Storm (DS) was their pricing, which when put to the “NewEgg test” was extremely competitive and many times lower than what it would cost to buy all the parts retail. After seeing this I lurked on their forums a little while and saw it populated with past, current, and potential customers and surprisingly, ACTIVE customer server reps. (who also man the phones I found out later). The reps did something I had never expected or seen; they would handle problems/questions on their forums as well as advise folks on their builds. People on the forums posted honest reviews with pictures showing the quality and care that DS puts into their work. All three of my prerequisites had been met easily and the choice was easy.

Initial ordering/build process:
 

  The initial ordering process went very smooth and painless. The only snag was in the actual processing of the order with my bank. Digitalstorm advises a couple times before you order and after ordering that you should call whomever you bank with to allow the order to go through. I was still in Iraq at the time so I had to do that when I got back. A week later when I returned, I called the bank then DS and order was processed that day (Sept 24th).

For my computer I had ordered:
• Silverstone TJ-10 case (originally TJ-09)
• Custom “Bluestorm” paint finish
• Intel QX 6850 quad core “extreme” processer
• (2) Gb Corsair Dominator 10000 (1250mhz)
• EVGA 680i A1 revision motherboard
• (2) EVGA 8800 Ultra video cards
• 1000 watt Thermaltake “Toughpower” power supply
• Water Cooling for both the CPU and the video cards w/”Medusa purple” liquid
• (2) Western Digital 150gb “Raptor” hard drives
• Western Digital 750gb hard drive
• (2) DVDR/RW drives (one with lightscribe)
• Media reader (12 in 1)
• SoundBlaster “XtremeGamer” sound card
• Blue Cathode lighting (originally white)
• Windows XP Pro w/sp2

  During the build I called many times to customer service to see how it far along the computer was and the service reps were always extremely polite and helpful. They called me a couple times, once to let me know my case had been upgraded to the TJ-10 (and to make sure I wanted it), to let me know that they no longer carried the white cathode lights (I then selected blue) and to let me know about the paint delay.

 

  The computer took about a month to complete and shipped on Oct 25th. This isn’t the norm with most orders, judging from the prior customers experience in the forums. Mine took longer due to the custom paint, water cooling, and the upgraded case.  The service reps also mentioned a higher volume of orders had been placed due to the “back to school” season. 

 

  After it was completed they were even nice enough to post a picture of my computer that they had taken before it shipped on the forums. Of course it’s a good way to advertise the product, but this level of personal service was again, way beyond what is expected from any company and was a nice gesture/touch.

 

  UPS called at 0800 that morning to inform me that someone had to be present for the delivery. That was covered and it was a very slow day at work having to wait. It finally arrived at my house at 1:30pm that day.

Inspection:
 

  There wasn’t any visual damage to the box and after opening it, saw that everything was tightly packed so that nothing would move around during shipping. The case itself was in a plastic bag, wrapped in bubble wrap and packed in high density foam. The system was clean, free of any fingerprints, and didn’t have a scratch on it. The plexiglass window had 2 small cracks where the allen bolts held it neither of which were larger than ¼ of an inch. A call to DS the next morning and a replacement window was shipped that same day. There were a bunch of SATA spare cables and various adaptors packed neatly in a separate small box, a binder with all the OS/driver/recovery disks and it also contained all the paperwork including the quality checklists. The 3dmark scores were hand written and I thought that was a nice touch.
 

  The interior of the machine was immaculate, some of the things that stand out were:

 

All the wires had been routed so that they were well hidden.

The cooling lines were done very cleanly and there were no kinks or air bubbles in the tubing.

 

The video cards had been secured in place with a couple of black zip ties in a very ingenious way. Even though the cards are huge and have fairly large water blocks on them, they weren’t going anywhere.

Initial startup:
 

  I got it all set up and booted with no problems upon its first startup. The system is very quiet and there wasn’t any noise coming from the cooling system. The 3.0 GHz proc was overclocked to 3.67 GHz (22% increase). The Corsair Dominator 1250 ram was running at 1066 MHz but the timings had been improved to make up for that. The DS techs explained that they do that because it yielded more performance that way and that there were some conflicts with the motherboard when the memory was run at the 1250 speed. 

 

  The OS install was just that, the OS. No bloat, no trial junk, just a clean XP Pro installation with the proper drivers installed. 

  After installing the drivers for my own personal peripherals, I started checking the connections for everything. The USB ports on the top of the case, the firewire connector, and media card reader all worked perfectly. I plugged my Turtle Beach HPA2 headset into the jacks on the sound card and the only thing that didn’t work was the mic. I tried the front jack as well and it didn’t work there either. After trying to troubleshoot the settings I came to the conclusion that it was a hardware problem. Popped the case open and inspected the card, I unplugged the cable connected to the card that ran to the top case jacks and the mic began to work. There was an identical plug zip tied to the same cable so I tried that one and then both jacks worked. It was a simple fix and wasn’t an issue.

 

  Out of the box, the system had no problems at all with typical usage. I ran it for about 4 hours installing various games, programs, and set it up to dual boot with Vista Ultimate (32 bit). I tested a few games on it and saw just how fast it really was comparing the 2 OS’s.

 

  I let it run overnight and it had no issues. Later the next day I did have one unexpected restart while I was playing the COD4 demo. I was thinking this was a driver/program issue since it was early on before I started getting updated drivers. After getting all the latest drivers I had a couple reboots while playing Bioshock and the Crysis demo as well. This only happened during max setting gaming sessions and didnt happen in other games. I went into the BIOS and dropped my CPU multiplier from 11x to 10x which dropped my CPU to 3.33 Ghz. After doing that I haven't experianced any more reboots. I plan to call DS after doing some research and see what can be done to get it back up to a stable 3.67 Ghz speed while in intensive gaming. The two speeds yeilded the same framerates during gameplay so it's not that important to me at the moment to get this thing pushed to the limit. It may be just NVidia drivers since it ran dead stable during other games/applications.

  Speed wise, this thing screams. In the binder that came with it, the recorded score in 3dmark was 17013. After performing a windows update and getting a few drivers I ran 3dmark 06 and scored 18995, downloaded the latest beta drivers from NVidia and then scored 19302 (with the 3.33 Ghz proc speed) That’s over a 2000 point difference… just shows you how much can be affected by drivers alone! 

 

 

  I can honestly say that I am completely satisfied with the final product and the service I received. From the initial order to now having it… DS did an exceptional job. The hardest thing throughout the whole process was waiting. Many times I almost called to have the unpainted panels put on just to speed it up but I am glad I was able to hold out and wait, it was well worth it. I never recommended to anyone to get a “built” computer before but now I find myself telling everyone just that.