I'm a local developer, part-time gamer, and long-time Geekbox customer. I remember walking into the West Jordan store back in the early days of their existence. In fact, I believe Adrian and Marshall were the only 2 folks in the place when I first stopped in.
I was in the market for a server to support my habits as a software developer and decided to see what they had to offer. It was immediately apparent that they knew their stuff when it came to gaming rigs, but I was pleasantly surprised at their knowledge of workstation/server systems, too. I like to buy local, so I decided to give these "new" guys a chance. Turns out, I'm a genius!
Still have the server running in my domain, serving up virtual environments for my development mayhem.
The day finally arrived for me to upgrade my dev/gaming machine, so another trip to Geekbox was in order. Here's the new rig:
The Cube
EVGA x58 MB
i7 Quad Core
Mushkin SSD
Mushkin RAM (6GB)
EVGA NVidia GTX 460
Speakers, monitor, etc...
I don't know if a one-word review can do this machine justice, but the word "stunning" comes to mind. That and, Holy $#!^, this thing is FAST!! Boot times are miniscule. Software installations are inconsequential. Simply amazing.
For the developers, here are some hard numbers:
Installed SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition - 13 minutes
Installed Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (with MSDN documentation) - 28 minutes
Installed Expression 4 Studio - 3 minutes
Installed Office 2010 Professional Plus - 4 minutes
Compare these numbers to what you're used to. Simply put, this thing is ridiculously fast.
As a point of reference, the workstation I use at my day job is a quad core Xeon with 4GB RAM, a 15K RPM SAS hard drive and an ATI FireGL video card. It's no slouch, by any means. My new Geekbox builds .NET applications 3 times faster than my workstation!! Sooooooo, if an app takes 30 minutes to build on my workstation, I could (but I don't, boss) build it on my Geekbox and have 20 minutes to play StarCraft II!! I love this thing.
For the gamers, I don't have any hard numbers, but I do have seat-of-the-pants measurements. It runs Doom3 at 1080p (with a couple config hacks) without a hitch. I've been playing SC2, and I am amazed at the speed at which the game loads and plays. Never a hiccup, and the graphics are fantastic. I've read around that SC2 can be hard on machines, but this box doesn't seem to think so.
But, in the end, you still have to deal with the manufacturer, no matter which machine you choose. The staff at Geekbox are true enthusiasts. They love PC's. They love games. They love performance. The whole crew was as excited as I was, seeing the machine ready for delivery. Their attention to detail, professionalism and enthusiasm is fantastic. My next
n machines will be Geekboxes.
