The guys over at destructoid.com weren't too impressed with Dell's $10,000 pricetag for the company's flagship Renegade system so they decided to take the matter into their own hands by collating the key components of a custom built Quad SLI gaming rig. Breaking their imaginary system down, they found that the main areas essential for building a machine comparable in performance to the Renegade were:

1. Duh, the Quad SLI graphics cards. A budget of around $2800 should set you up with a 4 card bundle.
   
2. A Gigabyte Quad SLI motherboard to stick those four cards in, $240.
3. Pentium 3.73GHz Extreme, $1300.
4. 10,000 RPM Hard Drive and 2GB of branded RAM, $450.
5. Battlefield 2 at 1600x1200 with graphics on full, priceless.

Chuck in a case, cooling, sound card, DVD drive and peripherals (keyboard, mouse and 2.1 speaker system) and you're looking at a budget of $6,000 for a well equipped Quad SLI system. That's around $2,000 less than the Renegade PC (sans the $2,199 30" widescreen monitor that Dell includes with their system) so you're not quite saving the $4,000 that the destructoid guys claim you will.

The obvious downsides to building your own Quad SLI rig include: the hassle of constructing the system and installing Windows yourself (although we're sure most people could do a better job than Dell) and the lack of a warranty, but before you think about these problems ask yourself the question: is that red flame color scheme worth two grand?

[Thanks, Franco]

Nvidia has announced that Quad SLI technology will be available from top system sellers, delivering ridiculous framerates at resolutions up to 2560x1600. Systems include Dell's already announced XPS 600 Renegade as well as machines from power players Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Voodoo, and—of course—the PrimeA Galleria 64Quad-SLI.

With prices around the $5K mark, don't expect to see Compaq offering these space heaters at the local department store; hardcore gamers only need apply. With this setup, you'd only need about 7 systems to push all the pixels in that ridiculous 10240x3072 display. Let's see, uh, 7 times $5K...

[Via Engadget]

[UPDATE: Added a clarification]