Paladin XLC Overview
Once we have the system out of the box we can see that iBUYPOWER has gone with the NZXT Phantom case. They have gone with the white version, which is by far my favorite. iBUYPOWER has really not done much to the exterior of the case except add a small logo at the top of the case and they have added a small card reader to the 3.5-inch external bay.
Taking the side panel of the case off we can get a look inside. The first thing I noticed was the nice cable management job. No one wants a case that has cables all around, that not only looks bad it is bad for airflow.
Taking a look at the components you have a nice dual radiator cooling the CPU. Usually we have seen single radiator designs on these customs systems so a dual one is something new. The dual radiator is cooled by 2 120mm fans and there is another 120mm exhaust fan. Of course the CPU in this system is the Core i7-3930K and it is surrounded by 16GB of Kingston DDR3 memory.
Moving down we have the EVGA GTX 580 video card, which is definitely a powerhouse! Finally at the bottom of the case is the Corsair TX850 850W power supply.
As far as storage goes you have an ADATA 120GB solid state drive and a 1TB SATA III drive. The solid state drive is of course for your operating system and the 1TB drive is for storage. Also iBUYPOWER has supplied a 24X dual format/double layer DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW SATA drive.
Man, seeing an X79 build review really takes me back. The i7-3930K was such a legend in its day; having 6 cores at 3.20GHz for a home gaming rig felt like absolute madness when most of us were still struggling to justify moving past quad cores. I especially remember the hype around liquid cooling being a “must-have” to really let those Sandy Bridge-E chips stretch their legs.
It’s funny to look at these specs now that my daily focus has shifted more toward enterprise hardware. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with a ProLiant DL360 rack that has a 16 Core 2.9GHz Xeon https://serverorbit.com/pc-and-servers/proliant-dl360/16-core-2-9ghz-xeon, and it’s wild how much the “core wars” have evolved. Back then, 6 cores were for extreme gamers, but now 16 cores in a 1U chassis is just a standard Tuesday for virtualization tasks. I still have a soft spot for the “cool factor” of cases like the NZXT Phantom mentioned in the post, though—server rails definitely aren’t as fun to look at!
Do you think these older enthusiast platforms like X79 still have a place as budget workstations today, or has the power draw versus modern efficiency finally made them too expensive to keep running?