One of the downsides to system reviews is that it's usually impossible to evaluate system reliability or performance over an extended period of time. Since boutique builders typically assemble rigs with a focus on solid warranties or top-level components, not being able to properly grade long-term reliability is an area of product coverage that some of you might find lacking.

Fortunately, we're currently in a position to investigate this sort of question with one particular product and perhaps on a higher level as well. About 18 months ago, we reviewed Origin's then-new Genesis system. The Genesis we looked at was a Core i7-920 overclocked to 3.8GHz with a Koolance water cooling system, 6GB of DDR3 RAM, and a brace of Radeon HD 5970s. In this article we'll discuss how well our original testbed has weathered the past 18 months, how we solved the few problems that arose, and compare its performance today with its previous results and a few newer systems. We're particularly curious to see how well the system's dual Radeon 5970 configuration (4 GPUs total) compares to current solutions. With "just" 1GB of RAM per GPU, it's possible we'll see the cards bottlenecking at ultra-high resolutions—but we honestly don't expect that to be an issue.