Smooth Creations Pyro

In the September 2008 issue (see page 30), we highlighted some of the dreamiest PCs available, including Smooth Creations' Neptune Xtreme Machine. To keep you dreaming, we spent some time with Neptune's counterpart, the Pyro. Overall, Pyro has quite a few impressive specs, great benchmark results, and a one-via-kind look. Annoyances, though present, were few and far between, and even those faded when set against Pyro's overall scorecard.

Smooth Creations is known for its mind-blowing designs, and the builder doesn't hold hack with Pyro. The Pyro's acrylic case is custom-painted with flames dancing along the front and side panels. All corners are grounded and polished. giving Pyro a leek, seamless feel. Several of Pyro's components are customized to fit the theme, including the PSU, drive cage, and watercooling reservoir. Even the cooling liquid is a blood-red.

On the subject of watercooling, Pyro is equipped with a Danger Den system that includes an eye-catching cylindrical reservoir, a CPU block, two CPU blocks, and a radiator (encased in a gold and flame design) The radiator's four 120mm fans hide behind fan grilles that arc custom-cut into Smooth Creations' logo and adorned with flames. This cooling capability is essential, because Pyro comes with an Intel Core 2 Quad QX9770 processor, overclocked to 4GHz and covered by a one-year parts and labor warranty.

Pyro did relatively well during the most CPU-intensive tests, completing Cinebench in just under a minute, with an overall score of 15,261. The SiSoft Sandra Lite tests also came with strong results. I expected the times for both WinRAR (1:37 [minutes:seconds]) and Dr. DivX (3:04) to be slightly lower, but neither score is close to disappointing.

My most exciting moment came when evaluating how well Pyro's dual Diamond Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards handled our gaming benchmarks. I wasn't disappointed, as the Pyro's four GPUs yielded a whopping 34.5fps in Crysis, higher than even our best
Dream PC, which reached only 25.661fps.

One thing I found slightly annoying was the lack of any easy-access USB, FireWire, or audio I/O ports on the front, side, or top of the case. Another frustration came when I slid the Pyro on its rubber feet interestingly enough, to access the hack USB ports), and one of the supporting rubber feet tore nearly in two. There will he no sliding for this case: You'll have to pick it up to avoid losing rubber feet.

The Pyro has a few other nice touches, such as the inclusion of both a Blu-ray drive and LightScribe-enabled drive, a lifetime warranty on the paint job, and the option to customize the system to your liking All-in-all, Pyre is a great-looking machine that performs right on target with the caliber of hardware found inside.

by Kris Glaser
Pyro
$7,040 (as tested)
Smooth Creations
www.smoothcreations.com





Computer Power User January 2009