To game or work? That is the question asked of themselves by many of my generation's peers. Surf Lexis for related case files into the night, or beat San Andreas again? But what if your work was gaming? Or tangentially related to. Like, for example, what if you made your living creating music for video games? Then you'd be very interested to know that the new Rain Recording Solstice Dragon Edition Audio + Gaming Workstation is the answer to the question that you don't have to ask yourself. What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, the new Rain Solstice Dragon. This thing is -- excuse the obvious metaphor -- a beast. See, VGM creators need as stable and powerful an audio production workstation as any composer or sound designer, except their system also needs to be able to handle the demanding, high-res, 3D graphics of today's modern games. That's exactly what the Solstice Dragon was designed for.

The Dragon can be outfitted with up to two ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Terascale graphics engines. . . way overkill for music production, but necessary for displaying smooth frame rates on, say, the next installment in the Fallout series. Pair this with the Dragon's AMD Phenom II 955 X4 Quad Core CPU, and you've got a dragon that'll take more than invisibility and hobbit-wit to confound.

Of course, a reference mix for the pro-audio world is not the same reference for the gaming world. When you're done bathing in the lush near-field image of your studio monitors, switch over to the Dragon's installed Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium sound card. It's the gold-standard for serious gamers the world over, and if you please them, well, your name is not Will Wright. . . mwah ha!

The other hot-rod appointments on the Solstice Dragon Edition include a 1TB RAID-0 Array OS/Game Drive plus up to 1.5TB for your audio streaming drive, support for 64-bit operating systems, and up to 16MB of high-performance RAM.

The starting price on the Rain Recording Solstice Dragon Edition is $3299.00 US.