iBuypower Gamer Fire 294

Impressive 3D gaming for a compressed price




BASED ON COMPONENTS that adhere to the AMD game platform initiative, which helps consumer choose good gaming computers with a minimum of fuss, iBuypower's Gamer Fire 294 offers solid 3D performance for gamers on a budget. For $1,299, you get quad-core procesing, dual graphics cards, and lots of room for expansion.

The Gamer Fire 294 uses a black Thermaltake Armor MX midtower case; a huge 230mm fan mounted on the windows side panel and two 120mm fans deal with intake and exhaust. While the system is idling, the three fans are a tad noisy, but when the CPU fan kicks in, the noise level is comparable to that of a small vacuum cleaner. Still, the tool-less chassis is well-stocked, with an 800-watt power supply, three free hard-drive and 5.25-inch drive bays, two available memory slots and 32-bit PCI slots, and one PCI Express x1 slot. Thanks to the inclusion of a Sony Blu-ray reader, a double-layer DVD+-RW drive, and a multiformat memory-card reader, support for virtually every removable-media format is covered. You don't get a monitor or speaker with this package, however.



With a quad-core AMD Phenom X4 9950 processor (2.6GHz), doule ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards, and AMD's 790X chipset under the hood, the Gamer Fire 294 is clearly up to snuff. The two graphcs cards are set up in a CrossFireX configuration, and the MSI K9A2 motherboard has a whopping 4GB of DDR2 memory. The system turned in some high-end benchmark scores, particularly on our DirectX 10 gaming tests and our productivity trials, proving the system is as good for work as it is for play. -J.R.D

Computer Shopper November 2008
www.ibuypower.com