[Howard Mills] "P.S. ADK did mention the board will be of "geek/gamer quality.""
From my personal experience, most gamer oriented products have performance / reliability / design ratio not in favor of the latter two. With HP, Dell, Supermicro (and in some instances, Asus) enterprise class (workstation, server, storage) products - it's reliability and serviceability first, design and usability (such as tool-less assembly, health monitoring, etc.) - second. All of that - not necessarily at the expense of performance, but performance does take the back seat to the first two. You just don't see many over-clocked or very "tuneable" servers and workstations.
Bottom line, I just don't see the same amount of engineering poured into gamer / geek systems, as into HP / Dell flagships, and in the end, it does matter - for overall quality and reliability. I want to use a tool that is well and purpose-engineered rather than stitched together from various geek / gamer components.
And hey - it's gotta look "pro", too. Name one geek / gamer case that even remotely approaches the "pro" look (not to mention features and quality) of Z800/820, or T7600 series. Sure,
Lian-Li PC-Z70 has that "stealth" enigma, and you can put nine (!) swappable drives into it, and yet there is a world of difference when you actually put them side-by-side and work with them.
Yet on the other hand, a system such as that from ADK (overclocked Ivy Bridge Core i7 with a 670 and fast RAM) - blow the doors off of anything similarly priced from Tier 1 makers, and you'd need to spend $1-3K more to get similar performance from HP or Dell.
Long post, eh?
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 - Los Angeles, CA
