Review: Primordial's Medusa packs plenty of power but lacks polish

If you live in a world where you can afford to drop $9556 on an enormous, water-cooled gaming PC with four (four!) discrete graphics cards, I envy you. But if you’re thinking of taking the plunge with Primordial Computers’ latest gaming machine, the Medusa, I’d encourage you to look before you leap.

As befits its name, the Medusa is a monstrous computer, with clear tubing snaking through its interior carrying neon-green-tinted coolant. The CPU and each of the system’s four (four!) GPUs have corrosion-resistant nickel-plated water blocks bolted to them. Apart from the absence of a custom paint job, the Medusa is the epitome of excess, with a strip of LED lights festooned around the interior of its gargantuan Corsair Obsidian Series 900D Super Tower case.

ROBERT CARDINPrimordial erred in failing to create some kind of mechanism to support the four Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan video cards that endow the Medusa with the power to crush gaming benchmarks.

But before I dive any deeper into this review, allow me to explain why the Medusa lacks polish: Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titans are heavy in their own right. Add 10 pounds of nickel-plated cooling blocks distributed among the four, link them together for quad-SLI operation, and you end up with a behemoth. If one card sags, it pulls the other three along with it. And that’s just what happened as the Medusa sat in the PCWorld Labs: The video cards began to droop to such an alarming degree that we wedged a piece of Styrofoam beneath them to keep them from falling out of their PCIe slots. [Editor's note: Primordial Computers contacted us after this review was published to strongly disagree with our opinion that the Titan cards need additional support, and to point out that the machine is covered by a three-year warranty.]

Considering that the Medusa is a custom-built rig, Primordial should have come up with an attractive brace to support the cards and take the strain off of those slots. And that wasn’t the only thing to go south (pun intended) during my evaluation. The Velcro holding an LED light strip inside the case came unglued and fell off right before we packed the machine to send it back to Primordial.

The Series 900D case measures an impressive 25.6 inches tall by 27.2 inches deep. It will fit under a standard 30-inch-tall desk, but just barely. It has room inside for four 5.25-inch devices and up to six hard drives or solid-state drives. Our review unit featured two 120GB SSDs in RAID 0 for blazing-fast speed, supplemented by a 1TB, 7200-rpm hard drive for practical storage. Primordial also put a Blu-ray burner inside. A massive radiator, with three large cooling fans, was mounted inside the top of the case, with four more large fans mounted at the bottom. All the wiring was neatly tied away and hidden as well as possible.

ROBERT CARDINPrimordial's Medusa is a true beast of a PC.

Primordial decided to stick with Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture, since that’s the company’s only CPU family with a hexacore processor (specifically, Intel’s Core i7-3930K stably overclocked to an impressive 4.5GHz and paired with 16GB of DDR3/1866 memory). But having more cores doesn’t automatically result in higher performance with every application.

The Medusa crushed the competition in the gaming-oriented portions of our testing suite, because those games and benchmarks could take full advantage of its plentiful CPU and GPU cores. With the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme benchmark set at a resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, for instance, the Medusa racked up an impressive score of 12871. Compare that with the results we saw from the Haswell-powered Micro Express MicroFlex 47B, which came to us with just one Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 video card and scored 3393 on that same benchmark.

Switching to real-world game benchmarks, the Medusa delivered an impressive 125.9 frames per second in BioShock Infinite with visual quality set to Ultra and resolution at 2560 by 1600 pixels. The MicroFlex 47B was able to squeeze out just 46.9 frames per second at those settings. We were also able to set up a triple-head array of 30-inch displays to play Dirt Showdown—at resolution of 7680 by 1600 pixels, with maximum quality settings—at a stunning 46.6 frames per second.

Our reference desktop system, an Acer Aspire U all-in-one, was not capable of running BioShock Infinite at these settings. (Click to enlarge chart.)

But games are only one element of our benchmark suite. We include a host of other tests because we expect that you’ll also want to explore creative pursuits (such as editing digital photos and video, and transcoding audio and video files), surf the Web, and generally be productive with your new PC. After all, few people can afford to drop nearly $10K on a new computer just to play.

WorldBench 8.1, which considers performance with creative and productivity apps as well as games, demonstrates a quad-core Haswell can outperform a hexacore Sandy Bridge CPU.

On several of those nongaming benchmarks, the Medusa’s performance was closer to the middle of the pack, because not every app can take full advantage of six CPU cores and four video cards. The Medusa scored very high in GPU-accelerated image editing—no surprise—but it was slightly slower than the MicroFlex 47B at audio editing, and it was only on a par with that machine in our video-editing test. So when all was said and done, the Medusa delivered an impressive Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 385—which means that it was 3.85 times faster than our reference desktop—but the MicroFlex 47B topped it with a Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 421.

If you’re looking for a pure gaming rig, the Medusa delivers what you need. We haven’t tested anything faster. But anyone spending this kind of money on a new PC should expect polish as well as power. And on that front, the Medusa leaves us stone cold.

Editor's note: This story was updated on July 17, 2013 to add the manufacturer's rebuttal to our opinion of the need for additional for the four video cards. We also added the resolution used to test gaming across three monitors, and we corrected the review to indicate that the LED light strip fell off because the adhesive backing on the Velcro attached to the enclosure failed.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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Primordial Medusa: Includes the Kitchen Sink

Excess: It's the defining characteristic of the PCs that sit atop our performance desktop chart, vying for supremacy by cramming bleeding-edge components into massive hulls.

Primordial Computers' Medusa ticks all of the requisite boxes: big case, lofty moniker, a dizzying array of tubes, and a monstrous price tag ($6495). But PCs are more than just the sum of their parts--does the Medusa earn a spot amongst PCWorld's Top Performance desktops? In a word, yes.

I'll start with the guts. The Medusa is built around an Intel Core i7-3960X processor. This is the recently released Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition CPU, but Primordial Computers has overclocked it to 4.9GHz. That CPU is backed up by 32GB of RAM (taking up every available DIMM slot on the Asus Rampage IV Extreme motherboard), and a fair bit of storage space: two 120GB Intel 520 solid-state drives in RAID 0, and a 2TB storage drive. A Blu-ray burner provides access to your optical media.

About that liquid-cooling array: It's...thorough. Everything is liquid cooled--the three AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards, the CPU, the RAM, even the motherboard. A bit much? I think so. But you will not want for thermal headroom, if you're one to play with voltages and core clocks.

All of that care pays off--the Medusa earned a score of 207 on our new WorldBench 7 benchmarks suite, a few pegs higher than other machines on the chart. As expected, it's no slouch in the gaming department--91.8 frames per second in Crysis 2, and 187.1 fps in Dirt 3, at a resolution of 2560 by 1600 pixels, on high settings. Anything over 30 fps is considered playable, and 60 fps is the gold standard for a smooth experience. These dramatically higher results are nice, though; you won't need to upgrade this behemoth anytime soon.

The Medusa's innards are housed in a Corsair 800D case. It's a familiar chassis that's spent quite a bit of time on PCWorld's charts, and is one of my favorites. Getting inside is easy, as the case walls pop off at the push of a button. But once you're in, you may not find much to do: The liquid cooling means taking a lot of tubing apart if you actually want to get in there and make some changes.

The four hard-drive bays are held in a separate, fan-cooled bay. They're readily accessible from the front of the case, and drives can easily be swapped in and out--just press a latch, and pull on the tray. Tool-free and accessible--always appreciated.

The trio of graphics cards offer a total of three HDMI ports, six mini-DisplayPort connectors, and 3 DVI ports. On the motherboard, you'll find six USB ports, four USB 3.0 ports, one eSATA port, analog audio output ports, an SPDIF optical output port, a PS/2 serial keyboard and mouse port, and the requisite Gigabit Ethernet port. The motherboard also offers Bluetooth connectivity, and a button that clears the CMOS battery--very handy if something goes wrong while you're tinkering.

So what's missing? Bloatware. The system hosts a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate, and nothing else. There's also no multiformat card reader, and the liquid-cooling reservoir on the face of the unit blocks most of the available 5.25-inch drive bays, but I suppose one can't necessarily have everything.

Is the Medusa nevertheless a good value? Forget the lofty price tag for a moment. Quick and dirty calculations put the parts list at about $4715. Add another $500 or so for the barbs, reservoir, radiators, pump, cooling fluid, and tubing that goes into that liquid-cooling array. And then there's shipping charges and sales tax.

Sure, those numbers are rough--you could probably do better on some parts, and get free shipping from sites like Amazon. But if you were looking to build this rig yourself, you'd save about $1000 to $1500; certainly not a bad "fee" for a stable overclock, comprehensive liquid cooling, and not having to do it all yourself.

I'm something of a hardcore PC gamer, but this level of performance is leagues above anything I'd consider--better to save for a few more displays and a few months' rent. But the Medusa shows off what Primordial Computers is capable of, and it doesn't disappoint.

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