And Now For The Hockey Sticks

I am in the market for a gaming PC (will talk more about which games in a few days) and attended Commodore-sponsored drinks at the Games Convention in Leipzig last week. Of course, only the real nerdy read this blog so I don’t need to explain who Commodore is (a blast from the past is also provided by the Wikipedia entry on Commodore). All the hardcore Commodore fanbois are of course crying bloody murder over the relaunch of the company as Commodore Gaming, but I am too old not to have wanted a C64 and too young to have bought one when I had my own money. Plus I am a bit of a gamer and thus 100% the target group for their new products: fast gaming PCs with exceptional exchangeable cases (corny name: “C-kins”, *cough*). I hadn’t really paid attention to the Commodore offering until I visited their GC stand and was awed by what they actually look like (their website doesn’t really do them justice):

Click for the hi-res version (careful, it’s really big).

I had been looking at Dell’s XPS line, Alienware and smaller manufacturers like Ultraforce and Hardware4u.net before and was actually thinking about building my own (which would probably result in a significant loss of cooling fluid while trying to install the water cooling system). Commodore is a real alternative that I can actually put in the living room. Now if only they didn’t cost about EUR4K/GBP2.8K for the high end system… :)

Details on high-end system stats:

Intel® Core™2 Extreme Quad-Core processor QX6800: 2.93GHz 8MB Cache
ASUS® P5N32-E NVIDIA® nForce® 680i SLI™ motherboard
2x 500GB 7200 RPM SATA Raid 0 hard drives
2GB Corsair™ DOMINATOR™ Twin2×2048-8500C5D memory: 1066MHz
DVDRW optical drive
850W ICE Cube power supply
Creative Sound Blaster® X-Fi Xtreme Gamer
2x NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 ULTRA 768MB SLI™ graphics cards
Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Ultimate operating system (I don’t get what this is doing in a current gaming PC…)