Boxx vs Maingear vs HP vs Rain vs Adk vs Puget

dbit

Honorable
May 13, 2012
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I'm looking at quite possibly switching to a windows based workstation after some mac hardware news comes out in the next few months. My primary uses are going to be motion graphics/compositing/3d and some editing work.

I've been looking at machines from: Boxx, Maingear, Puget, Rain, HP, Adk, Biway, and some others.

I'm not really that handy electrically. I'm not terrified of building my own machine but I'd really rather not be bothered with it, I've got other things to work on right now besides learning the ins and outs of building my own machine. What I'm wondering is, out of all these workstation companies that are out there, which ones are really worth it and charge a reasonable rate for their services without taking you to the cleaners? I've liked the systems I've seen at Maingear and Boxx so far as they allow me to customize a good deal and seem to stand behind their products but I've heard some people say they're overpriced. Some of the other configurers (such as HP) force me to purchase a certain graphics cards and memory configurations which I'd rather have more control over.

I guess I'm just looking for any advice or suggestions regarding dealing with these workstation builders, or any experience or opinions on any of them specifically. Any advice or information is much appreciated!

db

ps: My budget is between $4-$5k, but preferably staying in the low-mid 4 range.
 
Hello DB,

I just saw your post. I recently bought a workstation from a company called ORIGIN PC. These guys were refereed to me from a good friend of mine and boy let me to you, they are truly remarkable. Not only were they significantly more affordable than most competitors when it came to building my custom Workstation, but the service was just as amazing. They also are the only company to offer free technical support. 24 hours and 7 days a week! That was pretty much my save and grace because I work a lot at night and its nice to know that the support is there. Did I mention that the owners are also EX Alienware executives?? Yep, that is also good to know because Alienware was notorious for their gaming rigs way back before Dell bought them out.

Here is the configuration I built. It's a bit overkill but its perfect and brings a whole new definition to speed! I am not sure exactly what you had in mind, but the QUADRO 5,000 is a fantastic card!



Processor: Overclocked Intel Core i7 3820 4.2GHz

Memory: 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600Mhz (4x8GB) Quad Channel Memory

Graphics Card: Single 2.5GB GDDR5 NVIDIA Quadro 5000

System Cooling: ORIGIN FROSTBYTE 360 Sealed Liquid Cooling Systems

Power Supply: 1.5 Kilowatt Silverstone Strider

Motherboard: ASUS P9X79 WS

RAID 0

Hard Drive One: 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black SATA 6.0Gb/s, 7200RPM, 64MB Cache HDD

Hard Drive Two: 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black SATA 6.0Gb/s, 7200RPM, 64MB Cache HDD

12X Blu-ray Disc (BD) Burner (Reads and Writes to DVD/CD/BD) No Blu-ray Playback Software Included

CyberLink PowerDVD 12 Ultra

Media Card Reader

Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit Edition

3 Year Warranty


$5,268.00

All from http://www.originpc.com/genesis-pro-desktop-features.asp

Hope this helps!!