Features

We Provide the Fireworks; You Do the "Oohs" and "Ahhs Multiple GPU technology is a pretty new concept in the enthusiast graphics world. AMD's CrossFire and NVIDIA's SLI technologies really hit the gaming audience just over two years ago. They have since evolved into far more sophisticated, far more powerful incarnations; the most recent of which is about three months old. And yet, Intel has managed to take these technologies and mechanically and electrically configure their Skulltrail platform to fully support both of them. Imagine that: An extreme high-end motherboard that doesn't make you choose between the two ultimate graphics card technologies. Skulltrail epitomizes the Vigor mantra of uncompromised gaming performance. Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun Intel's Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform is populated by two enterprise-level chips. These are some crazy fast processors. The Starship Enterprise didn't get its name for any old reason. The Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processor, clocked at 3.2GHz, is faster than any desktop-level Intel chip (with the exception of the soon-to-be-released QX9770). In the Colossus, you get two of them. That's right. You get two quad-core processors from Intel - eight cores - working for you to get absolutely the highest possible performance from a gaming system. Because Losing Your Memory Sucks This section could have been titled, "Losing Because Your Memory Sucks", but for some reason we didn't use that. Both are true statements anyway, and the latter is one that occurs all too often when gaming on underpowered rigs. Vigor helps out by equipping your PC with RAM on an all you can eat basis. Want to run Windows Vista with no problems at all? We recommend a minimum of 2GB for that. Want to play a demanding game like Crysis on Windows Vista WHILE listening to music and chatting with friends? We suggest you land somewhere in the 4GB ballpark for that. If you're considering a notebook PC, subtract 1GB from these numbers (or don't). Gamers tend to not be the most patient people in the world, and that is why having more memory is a must for any serious player. Eliminate waiting times and increase your productivity with more RAM. A Force to Be Reckoned With When you buy a computer from Dell or HP, you get what you pay for. It doesn't take much for a system integrator to pop in a processor, slap in some memory, and ship out a finished product. At Vigor, we believe we owe it to our customers to go a few steps further. Just give us the word and we will do it. We will do something to your computer that few other system integrators do. We will ship your new computer to you overclocked straight from the factory. Overclocking is means of tweaking your computer in way that speeds it up significantly while maintaining stability. With overclocking you get more performance for less money, with Vigor Gaming you get more than what you pay for. The Times, They are A-Changin' As little as three months ago there was absolutely no way in hell we would ever recommend that a customer looking for the absolute best gaming experience possible select Windows Vista as the operating system for their computer. However, in the last two months Microsoft has released somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 bajillion hotfixes that correct various problems with security and stability in the operating system. But that's not even the good part! Microsoft has very recently released Windows Vista Service Pack 1. This service pack is a huge supplement to the operating system that fixes countless bugs a few of which are extremely annoying from a gaming perspective in particular. Combine these fixes with the guaranteed support of Microsoft for at least the next few years (you can't say that about Windows XP anymore), and have an OS that wins our recommendation. Of course, if you still want to select Windows XP, we're not going to stop you. A Modest Proposal At Vigor Gaming, we know you have a lot of choices when looking to buy a fully-assembled computer. We also realize that you may be tempted to go with a bigger name manufacturer just in case you run into problems down the road. However, the one thing we know that most other system integrators don't seem to understand is that, for the most part, all computer components are created equal. You can buy a computer from two different system integrators with identical parts that will run pretty much the same. In fact, you will find that reviews on hardware sites tend to focus more on the customer experience than the performance of the computer itself, since benchmark scores are pretty similar across the board. And, luckily for us, it is the arena of customer experience in which we excel. First of all, we don't charge an excessive premium for your system. Gaudy excess is not something we consider mandatory. Our professional system builders will piece together your computer with care and precision, make sure everything is nice and tidy, and ship it out not when it's done, but after it has been tested and performance has been ensured. Down the road, our support staff will be waiting for your call specifically. We don't get nearly as many calls as our larger competitors, so we have a lot more time to spend on each individual call. You might label it the "Vigor Advantage" - we just call it taking care of our customers.