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By Thomas McKinnon 2 September 2008

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Enhancing your experience; that is the sole purpose of any gaming PC.

A gaming PC is often considered the sum of three parts: A high-end graphics card, plus tons of RAM, plus serious processing power. All this equals a great time. The cold, hard reality is that this all costs serious moola.

The Sahara Extreme DT8455133-X880 is the ideal machine for gamers who want decent performance on a mid-range budget. Remember; graphics card + memory + processor = performance.

The PC has an Intel Quad Core Q6600 2.4Ghz processor; pretty good.  In terms of memory it has 2x 1024 MB DDR2 RAM and a 500GB SATA HDD; not bad at all. Lastly it has 8800GTS 640MB PCI-E card; could be better but is more than satisfactory. Clearly this is a pretty solid looking equation with X equalling fast paced, near stop frame free gameplay.

While this equation may offer a fairly accurate off-the-cuff assessment it fails to provide a holistic view. The PC’s
peripherals and extras play a role too. From a practical perspective the Sahara Gaming PC has USB ports by the bucket, it has a firewire port, a 52-in-1 card reader and a decent Samsung DVD writer. A concern though is the fact that it only has a single PCI slot.

Style and portability also matter. The Javelin case has a transparent side panel, understated blue neon lighting and a Genghis Kahnesque face. Okay, so it doesn’t have the most custom look or feel but it’s still cool. The side panel unscrews by hand and all the hardware slots at the back clip out.

After testing this gaming rig on Crysis, Quake: Enemy Territory and Test Drive Unlimited just to name a few, we came back thoroughly impressed with the machine’s ­performance even after running the games at their highest settings. Considering the machine comes with a MS SideWinder mouse, a MS keyboard, and Creative Inspire M4500 gaming speaker system, it is a good purchase with an RRP of R10 999 (incl VAT).

Contact Sahara Computers on 011-542-1000 for more info.

PROS
An Intel Quad Core Q6600 processor and 500GB of hard drive space [edited].
CONS
It only has a single PCI slot.
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