It isn't rare to see PC mods inspired by movies and TV shows, but when it comes to cartoons, modders usually take their cues from anime. There's nothing wrong with giant robots and ninjas, but I've always thought there's plenty of design potential in western cartoons. Who could resist an ACME PC, or one based on the 'Mystery Machine', 'Wacky Races' or 'Dastardly and Mutley in their Flying Machines' (aka 'Stop The Pigeon')? There's an untapped treasure trove of bonkers ideas for high-performance machines.
Despite its lack of wings, Scan's latest PC, the 3XS-7800 SLI, looks just like something Dick Dastardly, Mutley and the rest of the Vulture Squadron would pilot in pursuit of plucky Yankee Doodle Pigeon. There's the grey-green militaristic paint job, the big boxy case, and of course, hundreds of fans bolted on the back. Well, not quite hundreds: there are six. Still, six 120mm fans is a lot, especially as they only cool the water-cooling kit's radiator.
The radiator itself is a triple 120mm fan Asetek Black Ice model, with fans attached to both sides. It's fixed to the back of the Akasa Eclipse 62 case using Swiftech's RadBox mechanism, which is a relatively elegant solution to the problem of finding a case big enough to accommodate a high-performance water-cooling kit.
The Eclipse is a wide case, so there's a decent amount of room inside for the chunky black plastic Asetek WaterChill pump and reservoir. The water-cooling system cools the CPU and the two graphics cards, while the motherboard takes care of its own heat. This is a high-end PC, so it's hardly surprising to see the new Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard present, complete with a chunky heatpipe. The A8N32-SLI uses the new nForce4 SLI X16 chipset, so there are two chips on the board, enabling it to supply 16 lanes to each of the high-speed PCI-E slots, instead of the eight lanes provided by the original nForce4 SLI chipset. Both chips are passively cooled by a heatpipe and a radiator near the CPU socket. This in turn is cooled by the case's rear 120mm exhaust fan, which is a low-noise, Akasa Amber model.
There are also two 120mm Amber fans inside the case, an intake fan at the front and another fan hanging down from the PSU support strut to blow air onto the motherboard.
Nine 120mm fans and a serious water-cooling kit - what on earth needs all this cooling? As the 3XS-7800 SLI is a high-end PC, it has two graphics cards running in SLI. Its two 256MB Asus GeForce 7800 GTX cards are overclocked to 490MHz for the GPU, with their memory at 565MHz (1.13GHz effective). The CPU is even more exclusive - it's an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60. As you'll no doubt know by now from James' review, this is the first dual-core FX chip. There's a good chance that by now the 'Stop The Pigeon' song is running inside your head, with the Pigeon replaced by this most exclusive of CPUs. It certainly looks pretty appetising, although, as James mentions, its 2.6GHz clock speed is only a mere 200MHz ahead of the Athlon 64 X2 4800+.
The CPU and graphics cards aren't the only components creating heat inside the 3XS-7800 SLI. We criticised the last high-end Scan PC we reviewed, the 3XS Chameleon, for its noisy hard drive setup, comprising five Western Digital Raptors. With the 3XS-7800 SLI, Scan is continuing its effort to prop up hard disk sales, as it uses four 250GB Samsung SpinPoint P120S drives. While this theoretically provides a terabyte of storage, the drives are configured in RAID 0+1, so two drives are striped together for your use, while the other two follow them along, mirroring everything to create an automatic backup. This is a great setup in terms of reliability, but it creates a fair bit of noise. The P120S is quiet, as hard drives go, but when four of them encounter the F.E.A.R. level loading screen, they thrash and clatter away at the same time, which can be annoying. The 2GB of low-latency Corsair XMS3500LL Pro helps to minimise load times though.
Scan has done its best to keep the 3XS-7800 SLI's noise under control by using a passively cooled motherboard, quiet 120mm fans inside the case and limiting the speed of the 120mm fans on the external radiator. But at the end of the day, the 3XS-7800 SLI has a lot of fans, so noise is inevitable. This said, I wouldn't call the 3XS-7800 SLI a noisy PC - it's quieter than the Extreme Prometeia PC, and the 3XS-7800 SLI's deep thrum is easier to get used to than a high-pitched whine.
While a raised noise level is the downside of having fans outside the case, the benefit is that there's more room inside. Scan's technicians have made a decent job of the cabling, piping and wiring, and the third 120mm fan that hangs over the motherboard has been very neatly installed. There are a couple of minor points where the build quality slips; the four hard drives have been installed from top down in the drive caddy, leaving a gap at the bottom for air to enter from the front fan. This isn't as good as having the gap at the top, as air will find it harder to filter into the case from the bottom. Still, this is a very minor point, and Dick Dastardly didn't moan too much about the finer points of his Pigeon-killing planes.
What Dick Dastardly did take issue with is the overall specification: are the hammers big enough? Do the catapults work correctly? There are some spec quibbles with the 3XS-7800 SLI too, the biggest of which is its use of the motherboard's on-board sound. Considering that nForce4 boards still use the ancient AC97 codec, this isn't such a good thing - a Sound Blaster X-Fi would really help. The problem is that it would be very difficult to add one at a later date, owing to the water-cooling piping restricting access to the PCI slots.
PERFORMANCE
There's a lot of impressive kit inside the 3XS-7800 SLI - the FX-60, the nForce4 SLI X16 motherboard, and two 7800 GTXs - and it's no slouch when it comes to our benchmarks, scoring 1.48 overall. This is slower than the Vadim Fusion, which scored 1.54, despite having a very similar CPU, an X2 4800+ overclocked to 2.58GHz. However, the Vadim uses RAID 0 rather than RAID 0 + 1, which is faster because there's no data duplication involved.
It's a shame the FX-60 isn't quicker. We know how easy it is to run an FX CPU at 2.8GHz from our graphics test rig, so at 2.6GHz, the FX-60, strangely for an £800 CPU, seems a bit underwhelming. In the 3XS-7800 SLI, it wasn't too tricky to overclock the CPU to 2.8GHz, just by upping the CPU's unlocked multiplier to 14. This boosted the overall benchmark score to 1.57, which is faster than the Vadim, and one of the fastest scores we've seen. Now that's more like it!
The 3XS-7800 SLI didn't quite perform as we hoped in games either. We haven't found that having two 16-lane PCI-E slots makes any difference to performance, so we weren't counting on any miracles from the motherboard. Two GeForce 7800 GTXs had us hoping for crazy levels of anti-aliasing in F.E.A.R., but sadly, we found the game hopelessly buggy with SLI, even with the latest ForceWare 81.95 drivers. We successfully ran the benchmark, and at 1,600 x 1,200 with 4x AA and 8x AF, the 3XS-7800 SLI averaged a terrific 53fps, compared to 29fps with just a single card. The game was a different story, however, hanging, crashing and failing to work, just like Dick Dastardly's planes. Battlefield 2 proved similarly problematic - we couldn't play the game at all using SLI. Quake 4 was much more accommodating, averaging 60fps even at 1,600 x 1,200 with 4x AA and 8x AF. We could even enable Transparency AA, and the game looked beautiful, with clear lines and textures. Quake 4 shows that two GeForce 7800 GTX cards in SLI have plenty of potential - they just need better driver support.
CONCLUSION
The 3XS-7800 SLI is, for the most part, a well-specified PC. The lack of a true sound card is a weak point, but otherwise, it's cutting-edge. However, it couldn't help but come across as a little blunted, especially considering its price. Much of this is down to the FX-60, which is hopelessly poor value for money compared with the incredibly overclockable Opterons and high-end Athlon 64 X2 CPUs out there. SLI bugs further spoiled the party, although these will hopefully be fixed in time. The 3XS-7800 SLI is a good PC, but it won't win the 'perfect PC' tag.
Author: Alex Watson
Custom PC Online