When the British Navy launched the HMS Dreadnought in 1906 it was a real game changer, essentially making every steel warship of the era instantly obsolete. So significant was the design that it also eclipsed earlier designs and resulted in a naval arms race in the decade leading up to World War I.

While we probably won’t see a similar technological arms race in the world of PCs, the Digital Storm Dreadnought is almost as significant of a game changer, fitting that this could very well live up to the promise of being the ultimate gaming computer. More importantly, much like the early 20th century warships, the Dreadnought line can be fully customized to meet the end user’s specific needs and budget.

Tower of Power

The tower PC – and by that we do very much mean a massive tower – is a monolithic Chassis that allows plenty of air to flow around the internal hardware. The “bare bones” battlecruiser starts at just over $1000, and is available with AMD Phenom X6 1055T CPU and NVIDIA GT220 1GB video card. That will certainly handle a gamer’s needs for today and well into tomorrow. On the other end of the spectrum is what could only be described as the flagship model of the Digital Storm Dreadnought, which features an Intel Core i7 3.40GHz quad core processor and Sub-Zero LCS (liquid cooling system), which ensures that as the action heats up the computer won’t.

Heading into dry dock, the flagship version of the Dreadnought features a DVD-R/RW/CD-R/RW for all your back up and burning needs, while the Blu-ray/DVD drive will make this machine ready to movie viewing and more (see below). The PC features numerous ports of call as well, with a total of 10 USB ports, front and back Firewire and front and back SATA ports.

The system runs Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit Edition), and comes pre-loaded with Windows Recovery Toolkit for any emergency software damage control. Digital Storm further provides life-time expert customer care and a three year limited warranty. All this should soften the blow of the $2826 price of the Dreadnought in the ultimate configuration that we tested (although bare bones versions start at a measly $1100).

Sortie Worthy

We took the Dreadnought out to battle, and it more than met with our expectations. While the red neon lights from inside the computer do look cool, those can be a tad distracting, but fortunately can be disabled. What is also impressive is that the computer ran in almost a stealth mode. This is in part because the cases numerous vent holes allow fewer fans to do the work of many; more importantly the liquid cooling means the fans never have to do too much of the work.

This computer easily handled the latest (and most CPU- and memory-intensive) games, including Call of Duty: Black Ops and Medal of Honor with everything — and we do mean everything — set to “high” and with no visible performance glitches. In fact, the Dreadnought actually can handle higher settings than the typical defaults – a rarity with most off-the-shelf machines. Usually the game has to be a bit older before most PCs can go to the highest settings.

With Medal of Honor the game ran in 1680×1080@60Hz (the highest level in the game), with graphical, shadow, effect and texture quality as well as detail at advanced or highest; and with anti-aliasing set at a mind blowing 16xQ CSAA.

The real test will come when Battlefield 3 arrives for the holiday season, but this computer should easily handle everything the designers throw at it. In tests with the still very graphically intense Battlefield Bad Company 2, the video card allowed the 32x CSAA Anti-Aliasing and 16x Anisotropic Filter to be set at 1920×1080@120Hz. The result was amazing detail. There was no lag, no glitching, and more importantly the framerate stayed consistent at about 60 FPS. The system was pushed to the max, in other words “damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.”

Apparently you can put a price on gaming — $2826 (or less!). The computer’s processor and video card allows for the games to be seen and played as the designers see and play them. All the effects, from smoke and lighting, can be turned up and details that were previously missed made it as if I was playing these games, including Medal of Honor and Bad Company 2 for the first time. It was almost like putting on glasses you didn’t know you needed and suddenly seeing a sharpness that wasn’t there – and the performance didn’t sugffer at all.

Media Command Center

While the Dreadnought is no doubt overkill as a work machine, it can easily run multiple applications – including multimedia applications at one time. It thus can be used as a workhorse for extensive video editing and post-production as well as gaming.

And with a DVD recordable drive you can burn your dailies and have it ready for showtime. Alas, the machine doesn’t have a recordable Blu-ray option (but who does?). It will however serve as a good PC for viewing video, thanks to the addition of the optional Blu-ray (BD-ROM) drive.

The computer comes with Windows 7 and includes an HDCP compatible video card. The catch is that this PC doesn’t have an HDMI output — a fairly major oversight, in my humble opinion. It does have twin DVI outputs, so the simple addition of a DVI to HDMI adapter or a DVI to HDMI cable (such as the AmazonBasics HDMI to DVI Cable) will have you ready to set sail to the deep Blu-ray sea of video goodness, with the PC connected to a large screen flat panel TV or projector of your choice. The benefit of the DVI to HDMI cable option is that the specific NVIDIA GeForce video card on-board can even handle audio output over that DVI port – yes audio! The card passes through audio over that DVI port and the DVI to HDMI cable that we used happily passed that audio through to the TV’s speakers. However, for the best sound, we found the optical or coax digital outputs plugged into a receiver were a better way to go.

Blu-ray movie playback was impressive and smooth with no glitches or stuttering, and no noticeable artifacts even on my fairly large 52-inch LCD HDTV. On the audio end, the Dreadnought offers both S/PDIF coax and digital optical outputs. It’s not lossless (again, that would require HDMI) but it can sound fairly awesome though a high quality receiver and surround sound speaker system.

With this PC in your arsenal, you could very well start an arms race as your friends look to (try) to keep up with you. And unless they set sail with their own Dreadnought, or they invest similar coin (and some time and expertise) in a home built system, you’re likely to blow them out of the water.

Turn Ons:

* Everything you could want in a gaming/Media Center/Home Theater PC including Blu-ray and recordable DVD
* More connections than a Hollywood super agent (Firewire, USB, S/PDIF, multiple USB 2.0, etc.)
* Liquid cooled
* Lighting fast speed
* Dual DVI outputs

Turn Offs:

* Dreadnought is no joke, this is a massive box
* Design is great if you like a Transformers style case
* Requires military deficit spending to buy one
* No HDMI output (easily solved with a DVI to HDMI adapter)

Final Thoughts:

Gaming PCs are a great investment if you spend your free time in virtual worlds and don’t mind foregoing an actual vacation to real destinations this year. The Dreadnought is just such a computer. It is extremely powerful — in fact it is so powerful that few games actually require this much. While PC games are hanging on, and have dedicated followers there are sadly fewer and fewer new titles worthy of such a machine. But for those few titles, this is a machine that will certainly be able to tackle virtually anything coming out in the next year. And like most gaming rigs this one is upgradeable so it can go into “refit” so to speak, leading to a long and happy gaming life before it must eventually be retired.

Source:http://www.bigpicturebigsound.com/Digital-Storm-s-Dreadnought-PC-Review.shtml

If you asked someone to draw a picture of “computer” a century ago, they’d have shown you a person, perhaps a famous astronomer like Henrietta Swan Leavitt, or a team of people cranking out calculations on paper. Fast forward a few decades to World War II and those in the know might sketch a massive metal machine like ENIAC or the UK’s Colossus, cutting-edge devices developed to break military codes. Today in the 21st century, you’d likely get a picture of a svelte aluminium laptop.

In the space of a mere 100 years, our notion of computers has transformed from a room full of people to microchips and LCD displays. What hasn’t changed is the way in which we interact with them, with rows of buttons (keyboards) and 30 year old pointing devices (mice).

While there’s plenty you can do with keyboards and mice, they limit creativity and productivity in ways that are hard to imagine, especially among those who don’t have the time or patience to learn. But the advent of interfaces that merge the digital and the physical in ways never seen before, from cheap touchscreens to motion controllers, heralds the dawn of an unparalleled era of digital creativity – one that’s open to everyone.

Digital Art

Any admirer of Pixar’s movies would agree that their computer animators produce some of the most beautiful art today, even if the tools they use would be completely unrecognisable to Walt Disney’s pen-and-paper animators. Yet when we watch expert computer animators and designers at work, what’s most notable is the complexity and expense of their tools, making their individual efforts seem more like technical rather than artistic achievements. In other words, we think computer art is for geeks – real artists work with their hands.

Thanks to the iPad and other high-tech devices, that attitude is about to be challenged. The iPad isn’t the first affordable touchscreen tablet to be released, nor is it the cheapest, but what makes Steve Jobs call it “magical” is not the hardware, it’s the software. Painting using an app like Brushes is simply a matter of choosing a colour and a brush and then swiping your finger across the screen. There are no help screens to wade through, no shortcuts to memorise, no hunting through hundreds of menu items; just a canvas and some colours.

Even more impressive is Apple’s new Garageband music-creation app. On first glance, Garageband seems like a toy designed for children – a welcome diversion perhaps, but not a serious tool. Spend ten minutes playing around with the dozens of virtual instruments and the eight-track recording studio though, and you’ll understand why professional musicians are rushing to download it.

It’s not the professionals who we should be getting excited about – it’s the amateurs. By selling Garageband at only £2.99, Steve Jobs has effectively handed his credit card to every iPad-owning teenager in the world and let them loose in a Yamaha shop. As a result, the next Mozart may never write a music score in their life; they could just use Garageband to record, mix, and compose all their songs.

For those of you terrified by this possibility, rest assured that the makers of real instruments are fighting back. Harmonix, creators of the Rock Band music game, have just released the Fender Squire Stratocaster, a fully-functioning electric guitar that can also be plugged into a games console. Sensors embedded into the guitar’s neck and strings mean that the game can record and transcribe every single note and chord played, making it a boon for musicians and an infinitely patient (and fun) instructor for learners.

Looking further afield , there’s a real possibility that the next Antony Gormley or James Cameron could learn their trade via the Playstation Move and Xbox Kinect. The Move allows users to sculpt 3D objects simply by moving two highly-precise “wands” around in the air, and the Kinect can perform 3D motion capture in real time, giving an entire generation of young people the chance to make the next Avatar (or hopefully, something rather better).

Only five years ago, the Move and Kinect were state-of-the-art technology; today, they cost around £100.

The Digital and the Physical

No one could call this “evolution”. The iPad isn’t just a new, shinier canvas and the Playstation Move isn’t just an updated version of a sculptor’s chisel – they are entirely new tools that allow us to learn and experiment at a fraction of the time and cost to previous generations.

Painting a landscape and make an errant brush-stroke? Just press undo. Want to hear what your composition might sound like in a different key, or performed by a 90 piece – or even 900 piece – orchestra? What might have taken hours of painstaking transcription now takes a second. Want to make intricate 3D objects that couldn’t be made by traditional sculpting or machining processes? With 3D printing, you can make practically anything you can imagine. You could create a sculpture without ever having touched or even seen the material yourself.

These new tools won’t eliminate the need for thousands of hours of practice, though; indeed, they’ll almost certainly unleash a torrent of mediocre art. But in response to sceptics who glorify the drudgery of “old” art and the value of limits, it’s instructive to remember the old days of those “human computers” (who doubtless understood arithmetic far better than we do). No one believes that that hard labour is somehow preferable to using modern computers capable of billions of calculations per second, and few writers would exchange their laptops for pens and paper.

We risk hypocrisy if we frown on artists who embrace new tools. Art and technology have always progressed hand-in-hand through the millenia, from the discovery of new pigments and materials, to the printing press, to the video camera and beyond. The tools we need to be creative have become more widespread and affordable at every step of the way, and we don’t regret that.

But something even more extraordinary is happening now. For the very first time, we will no longer need to buy and master specialised, expensive (and frequently, poorly-designed) tools to create art and music. Thanks to fast processors, touchscreens and motion sensors, as long as you can afford an average computer or console, you can make almost anything, whether it’s a painting, a movie, an opera, or a statue.

We’ve come a long way from the human computers of a century ago – now the digital and physical worlds are colliding, just think what new kinds of artists and artworks we’ll see over the next hundred years.

Source:http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/adrianhon/100006495/the-digital-and-the-physical-worlds-are-colliding/