We prefer to believe that the Revolt, along with its fellow revolutionaries from Alienware, Falcon Northwest. and Digital Storm, is part of the first expedi-tionary force attacking the substandard gaming performance that consoles have subjected its citizens to for years.
As we've said of the other small PCs of this ilk, you need only slap a $26 wire-less Xbox controller on the Revolt, get it set up with Steam's Big Picture Mode. and you'll not only have a gaming ma-chine that fits in nicely in the living room, but that will also likely blow away even next-gen consoles.
The Revolt uses a new NZXT chassis that iBuypower has exclusive rights to. It's slightly wider than three other simi-larly shaped boxes we've reviewed from Alienware, Falcon Northwest, and Digital Storm. iBuypower manages to jam in a 14cm NZXT liquid cooler, which lets the Intel Core 17-3770K hum along at an over-clocked 4.26Hz. The rig also sports an EVGA GeForce SIX 670 OPU and is large enough to support both an HOD and SSD. This is significant because the box that spurred it all, Alienware's X51, forces you to pick either an HDD or SSD, not both.
While the X51 uses an external power brick, the iBuypower uses an internal FSP 500-watt PSU. There's actually an upside and downside to both setups. The downside here is the noise. Our pre-production Revolts 1U power supply got shriUy under heavy loads. We had the same issue with Digital Storm's Bolt. which was rectified in shipping units. iBuypower promises improvement in the final units, but ours was just too noisy to be used under load in an HTPC environ-ment. However, seeing how other ven-dors have been able to tame the issue by tweaking the fan profiles and thermals, we suspect iBuypower will be able to do the same.
Performance of the box against our desktop zero-point, with its hexa-core processor, was not pretty but that's hard-ly a surprise, considering the ZP's size and parts. Lest you think that a quad-core Ivy Bridge ticking at 4.20Hz is Atom-poo slow, however—ifs not. Even in the heavily multithreaded Premiere Pro test. the Ivy Bridge was but 31 percent slower than our Core i7-3930K at 3.89Hz. The GeForce GTX 570 also shows pretty well when you rnnsider that the zero-point is housing a GeForce GTX 690.
We also stacked up the Revolt against the Falcon Northwest Tiki and Digital Storm Bolt lwe didn't have the original X51 on which to run our new benchmarks) and found the Revolt competitive but the slow man out against its two peers. Oddly enough, in our Premiere Pro CS6 bench-mark, the similarly clocked Revolt ran about 9 percent behind the Tiki and 11 percent behind the Bolt—that's probably partly due to its single-channel RAM.
But there are a couple of ways in which the Revolt excels over those two boxes. For one thing, it has the ability to run when laid flat, which makes it far more flexible for living room use. It also Cleats both the Tiki and Bolt in the price game. The FNW Tiki we reviewed in September 2012 came equipped with dual 50068 SSDs and a GeForce GTX 680 for $4,126. No doubt 500GB SSDs have dropped in price, but not by that much. The Digital Storm Bolt, took the price down to $1.950, using just a 120GB 55D but giving you a GTX 680 card, too. The iBuypower Revolt comes in even lower, at $1400. Is that a good deal? Spec-for-spec, yes. It's even comparable to Afienwarels top-end X51, which gives you a 2T8 HDD and 16GB of RAM, but is capped at a GeForce GTX 660 and there's no option for an SSD.
That puts the Revolt in a pretty good spot. No, You can't get it as speed-out as the Bolt or Tiki, but at this price, a lot of folks won't care. Overall, i Buypower gets a lot right with the Revolt and brings its trademark practice of packing in the per-formance without Packing on the price.
iBuypower Revolt Specification
Processor: Intel Core i7-3770K @4.2GHz
Mobo: iBuypower Z77E
RAM: 8GB DDR3/1600 Single-channel
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 670
Sound Card: Onboatd
Storage: 120GB Intel 330 Series SSD, 1TB WD Cavier Blue
Optical: Blu-ray combo drive WH14N540
Case/PSU: Custom / FSP 500W
Benchmarks
Our current desktop test bed consists of a hexa-core 3.2GHz Core i7-390K 3.8GHz 8GB of Corsair DDR3/1600 on an Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard. We are running a GeForce GTX690, on OCZ Vertex 3 SSD and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional.
http://www.ibuypower.com/
