Maybach- Say GoodBye to Pure Luxury

                Luxury car manufacture Mercedes Benz, has announced a few months back the termination of its Maybach Line of Ultra Luxury vehicles that were set to compete with Bentley, and Rolls Royce. To me this is a sad moment, since I like to imagine myself getting one in the future, at the price of $344,000+, well maybe in my dreams. Amongst the crowd of millionaires and billionaires the Maybach is not selling too great. This has got Mercedes to think, and it also caused them to announce the closure of Maybach in 2013. As a car enthusiast I can say that Maybach is truly a luxury vehicle. It has features that some of us don’t even know exist. It is a blend of high technology and peaceful luxury thanks to the fully sound insulated cabin. You can be going 200km/h + thanks to its powerful V12 Mercedes engine and still not hear the outside world. If you shell out close to four hundred grand on this Maybach 62S ($430,000) you almost everything standard, things such as: navigation systems, voice recognition, 5 zone climate controls, interior air filter, electric dimming sunshade, rear entertainment system with separate DVD players, massage functionality on all seats, 30 speaker Bose surround sound system, adaptive leather/wood wrapped steering wheel, power trunk, radio with a 10 disk changer, keyless entry/start, all seats are heated, power panoramic sunroof (enormous), cooled seats, adaptive cruise control, full leather upholstery, 18 way front power seats, 18 way rear power seats, heated/cooled cup holders, park assist (including camera), iPod adapter, wireless cell phone link, wireless headphones, voice activated sun-roof (mentioned earlier), heated glass windows, night vision (yes indeed, that is standard). All of the functions listed above (and more) come STANDARD (on the 62S), which is amazing, 30 speakers, I myself had to look at a diagram to understand how they fit them all in! The Maybach 62S has more features than the cars equivalent from Rolls Royce, not to mention the V12 turbocharged engine boasts more horsepower than the Rolls. Options include: a partition wall between the chauffeur and the passengers, which costs $30,500! That is just one of the endless options available, and some are free, and some come at a cost. However things don’t stop there, you can have your Maybach outfitted with diamonds, exotic leathers (you can even chose the exact animal you want the leather from), paints, amenities, you can even have it armored! The options are endless, as long as your wallet can support them.

Source: http://www.autoevolution.com/images/wallpapers/MAYBACH62Zeppelin-4189_2_1280x960.jpg

http://www.speedlux.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Maybach-62-Zeppelin-3-650x302.jpg

                                   

                                                        http://www.cars-bikes.info/d/6683-2/maybach-type-62-zeppelin-007.jpg 

           Is the 62S with its ridiculous price tag not enough? Well Maybach has good news, you can get a 62 Zeppelin Limited Edition for $677,000, or a Maybach Landaulet for a mere $1,350,000. Not convinced? Well you’re not alone. Maybach has excellent cars, and I almost drooled over one when I saw one in Germany, but the point is that Mercedes didn’t distinguish it enough from its normal line of cars, and by normal I still mean ultra-luxury, like the S class. Customers who are willing to pay such crazy sums of money opt to buy other cars like Bentleys, or Rolls Royce, both of which are owned by German car companies (Volkswagen, BMW). This does not mean that the Maybach cars lack features, in fact in some cases they have more to offer than a Rolls, it is just that Mercedes didn’t distinguish it enough from its popular S-Class. They should have advertised their heritage (they go back to 1909), and their exclusive materials, both of which the definitely have, they were simple not expressed well enough. I will be sad to see the brand go off the market, but it will always remain in my dreams.

Building/Choosing a Gaming PC: Basic Examples

Blog post rant part 2

A real gaming rig is something that is built specifically for gaming and that fulfills the need of it's owner. The best gaming pc's are not Alienware but custom built pc's. Custom built pcs are usually built by the gamer, however there are plenty of companies that will build them. Custom built pc's use a variety of different parts to create something exceptional. A gaming pc can cost anywhere from a few hundred bucks to a few grand. It all depends on the components. The amount of power in a gaming rig depends on a person’s budget. For up to $1000 (more or less) you can get a rig with an i5, 8gigs of ram, a Nvidia GTX 560 (or a 560ti) and all that with a decent case, motherboard, and power supply. Along with that there is room in the budget for a nice 1tb HDD, and an aftermarket heat-sink for the CPU. Now such a rig will run most games maxed out on higher resolutions. However it will not run Metro on max @1080p, it would have to be overclocked, and even then the GTX 560 could fall short. However it will run both Metro and Crysis on very good settings (specifics depend on which resolution one plays on). So for one grand it is possible to have a powerful pc that will run anything. It is optimal for a person with a decent budget and someone who just wants to game with some eye-candy. It goes well with a single monitor setup.

The next tier is priced at $1000- $2000. It would look something like this:
I7-2600K
8GB or more of RAM

A nice motherboard (check out the Asus mobos, currently they are the best ones out there)
Gtx 570 or 580
1tb hdd (with the possibility of having a small SSD)
A nice case ( full tower)
And a 750+ watt power supply ( with OC and dual GPUs 1000 watts is recommended)
Aftermarket heat-sink or a CPU only liquid cooling set up

Now this is on a whole other level, since with a slight  overclock this pc will handle any game maxed out. The pc is intended for a single monitor set up, but if the budget were increased a bit, along with 2 GTX 560 instead of a 580 it could support a triple monitor set up. Another option would be to go with an AMD card instead of a GTX 570 or 580 for a triple monitor set up since these can support three monitors natively. This set up will provide lots of eye candy @ 1080p with room to future games. If done right the CPU can be overclocked to 5ghz. So this is some serious gaming power. Now in this budget you could also have a very good aftermarket heatsink or even a liquid cooled processor, however this depends on how much money is left. Now due to flooding in Thailand the hard drive industry has suffered some losses, since it cannot a lot of hard drives at the moment which means that hard drive prices have skyrocketed, that means that a 1TB hard drive that used to cost say for example $140 now may cost two hundred dollars or more.

The next tier (for someone with a very large budget $3500+) would look similar to the previous one except some more parts would be added or changed. Now I will briefly outline this, however the components of a pc depend on a persons need and specific budget, this is just to give an example. Here it is:

Intel Core i7-3960

More RAM

an SSD

High Performance motherboard (like Asus Maximus Extreme series)

Fully liquid cooled

Full Tower case (example. Corsair Obsidian 800D, although there are other options)

SLI or Crossfire GPU configuration

1200+watt PSU (depending on components, like amount of GPU's)

Etc.

Now for those readers who think that some of this is wrong or it can be better, the truth is that it can. I am only outlining the basics, and just giving examples. There are hundreds of different possible configurations, and in this article I am only giving general information. Now you will notice that I used Nvidia cards for as examples, however note that I am not a fanboy, and depending on your preference these cards could be substituted with cards from AMD. Note that Nvidia is due to release the Kepler cards later this year to go alongside with the Radeon 7000’s cards, so if you are in the market for a new gaming pc you may want to wait a bit.

I will not spend the next few hours outlining the different possibilities so if you want to know what would be the ultimate gaming PC without a budget, and you would like to see some specifics check in soon for another article.

NOTE: At the time this article was written the AMD 7000 series was not released yet, and since then things have changed. I have mentioned the 7000 series to let readers know that it is an option. Also note that the Radeon HD 7970 has taken the throne as the fastest single GPU card in the world from the GTX 580. Also note that prices of parts have changed, for example hard disk prices (mentioned in the article).