The Socket 939 AMD Opteron 146 CPU, as any overclocker worth his salt will tell you, is an amazing budget-friendly chip. While it's fairly dull at stock speeds, when overclocked, it's well known that it has the ability to rival, or even outperform, expensive Athlon 64 FX CPUs.
Last month, we reviewed the 3XS Opteron 144 OC, an Opteron 144 PC put together by Scan Computers. It offered great all-round performance for its £1,245 price tag, and consequently walked away with a place on the Elite list. Nevertheless, we felt that Scan hadn't quite realised the full potential of the Opteron. We were eager to see if, with a smaller budget and an Opteron 146 CPU, Gladiator could put together a system with even more muscle.
The outstanding, Labs-winning DFI Lanparty UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert motherboard nestling inside the Titan should be perfect for the job of getting the best out of the Opteron 146. This task requires a big overclock, and in this respect, the DFI is a better, more flexible choice than the relatively voltage-phobic Asus A8N-SLI Premium that Scan uses.
Our other main bone of contention with the Scan is its use of Corsair PC4400, as it isn't fast enough to run at a 1:1 ratio with the Scan's 295MHz FSB. Gladiator has shipped the Titan with 2GB of Mushkin Redline RAM. While the dark red modules look menacing enough, they're only PC4000, so they have a maximum rated speed of only 250MHz. This caused us to wonder if they'd be able to keep pace with the high FSB values needed to push the Opteron. Still, the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro CPU cooler, another CPC favourite, reassured us that Gladiator was taking this overclocking game seriously.
The Titan's FSB runs at 250MHz, which is the RAM's rated speed, so it runs at a 1:1 ratio. This overclock takes the Opteron 146 from its stock speed of 2GHz up to 2.5GHz. This is fast for an AMD chip - only 100MHz slower than the FX-55 - but the Scan is clocked more adventurously at 2.65GHz, so the Titan's out-of-the-box speed feels a little reserved.
For graphics, Gladiator has opted for the pre-overclocked XFX GeForce 6800 GS XXX Edition. The 6800 GS is a revamped 6800 GT, which is cheaper because it has only 12 pixel pipes, yet it's just as fast, thanks to high clock speeds - a 485MHz GPU and 256MB of GDDR3 memory running at 550MHz (1.10GHz effective). The XFX offers very good performance for its £150 price tag, but this is where Gladiator's tactic of sticking to the £999 price point lets its PC down. Although the Titan costs £250 less than the Scan, as Scan has gone all out and used an overclocked GeForce 7800 GTX, we can't help but feel that a 7-series GeForce would be much more at home with such a speedy processor and large amount of memory. However, you can choose which graphics card you want for your system on the Gladiator website, and a 7800 GT would be a better bet.
Powering all this kit is a 480W Tagan modular PSU, which should offer more overclocking headroom and will be able to cope with any additional kit, should you want to upgrade the PC. There's only a single hard disk, a decent-sized 250GB, S-ATA II Western Digital Caviar SE16, and a single dual-layer DVD burner drive, the excellent Pioneer DVR 110DBK. The Titan also comes with a memory card reader/floppy disk drive, but its big, clunky EIDE cable, which plugs in right next to the air intake of the Freezer 64 Pro, means that it's probably better to do without it.
The chassis housing all this kit is Gigabyte's 3D Aurora. It's tidy inside, but as you can see from the Labs test, the Aurora's hard disk bays block its air intake to pretty nasty effect. There's plenty of space inside for a second graphics card to run in SLI, or more disks, but you might need to change the fans to keep everything cool if you opt to do this.
Externally, the Titan's chassis is a little less convincing. It certainly looks good, as it's all aluminium, but it doesn't feel as solid as we'd like, with the door unwilling to shut securely.
PERFORMANCE
Generally speaking, the Titan's GeForce 6800 GS provided decent frame rates in games at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA. F.E.A.R. was a little too taxing though, and you'd probably need to drop the AA for it to be smooth.
In contrast, the Scan's overclocked GeForce 7800 GTX ripped through all of our 3D benchmarks, and its large Quadro heatsink also meant it was also a lot easier on the ear than the XFX 6800GS XXX Edition, which makes quite a racket.
In our 2D tests, the Opteron can really show off, and while 2.5GHz is a good 500MHz less than the speed that Opterons are capable of delivering, the Titan still flew through our benchmarks. Its overall score of 1.10 is quicker than the score achieved by the Athlon 64 4000+ system in our last CPU Labs test, and only slightly behind the Scan's 1.13.
With the Titan being a veritable candy store of premium overclocking equipment, it would be rude not to do a bit of tweaking - especially as the Opteron 146 is arguably a better chip for overclocking than the Opteron 144, as used in the Scan. The Opteron 146 has a higher multiplier (10 as opposed to 9), so the FSB doesn't need to be raised as high to achieve the same clock speed.
Raising the FSB to 265MHz pushed the Titan's CPU to 2.65GHz, the same speed as that managed by the Scan, but this was the limit for the Mushkin RAM while running at a 1:1 ratio.
In order to let the DFI really throw its weight around, we used a 166MHz divider to prevent the RAM exceeding its maximum rated speed. The endlessly 'tweakable' voltage options in the BIOS, combined with the excellent air-cooling ability of the Freezer 64 Pro HSF meant that we could push the Opteron 146 much further than 2.5GHz. Using the DFI's BIOS to increase the vcore by 36 per cent, we raised the FSB to a titanic 290MHz, which gave us a perfectly stable 2.9GHz CPU to play with. With 1.55V running through its veins to keep it stable, the Opteron was admittedly running warm, although the 49ûC core temperature when under load isn't outrageously hot.
Watching the Titan eat up our benchmarks at this speed was quite enjoyable. If you're wondering why there's such a furore over the Socket 939 Opteron then take a look at the Paint Shop Pro test - the overclocked Titan scored a frankly ridiculous 1.61. At 2.9GHz, the Titan's overall score is 1.24, basically the same sort of speed you'd get from an overclocked Athlon 64 FX-57 system, a processor that costs over £600 by itself.
CONCLUSION
With the Opteron 146 clocked at 2.5GHz, the Titan packs a hefty punch. This is the maximum speed that Gladiator will guarantee, and anything over and above is, to some extent, down to the luck of the draw.
Sticking to an arbitrary £999 price limit means that the Titan's graphics card isn't quite suited to its high-powered CPU. If you want to make the system perfect then you should specify a better graphics card.
While the case might not be as good as the Akasa Eclipse that's used by Scan, the Titan comes out ahead in other respects. Its motherboard and Opteron 146 CPU make for better overclocking. As far as PCs with scope for modding, upgrading and tweaking are concerned, the Titan is a winner, and it will provide enviable performance for some time to come.
Author: Chris Lee
Gladiator Titan CPC Expert