If somebody tells you that economics is boring, you should remind them of two things: 'Wall Street' is Michael Douglas' best movie; and secondly, without a healthy appreciation for economics, it's easy to get gypped into buying a ridiculously overpriced lump of junk for a PC. A good PC isn't just about getting the right components, it's about getting the most out of them and nothing exemplifies this idea more than AMD's Opteron 144 CPU. When used at its prescribed, factory default settings, it's a cheap and rather bland little chip, running at a mild-mannered 1.8GHz, but when overclocked, it rocks harder than The Mighty Thor in the Motorhead mosh-pit.
With that in mind, we're pleased to see that Scan's latest PC, the 3XS Opteron 144 OC, not only features an Opteron 144 as its CPU, but that the system has also been worked over by Scan's team of overclocking boffins. This PC is economics and empirical engineering in perfect harmony.
The Scan certainly presents an imposing image. Sending a yellow PC to any magazine is a bold move, because if it underperforms you can be sure that the headline 'it's a lemon' won't be far behind. Whether or not you like the colour, a bright coat of paint is one way to overcome the slightly bland, boxy looks of the Akasa Eclipse case, and the finish is high-quality.
On the inside, the build quality is outstanding. Great use is made of the vast space available inside the Eclipse, and the wiring has been tucked out of the way, so there's plenty of room for your own expansion cards and other modifications. Due to the size of the case itself and the immaculate way in which the internals are installed, the airflow is completely unimpeded, so you get all the benefits of the twin 120mm fans. The fans are from Akasa's excellent Amber series and are much quieter than the stock fans included with an ordinary Eclipse case.
As already mentioned, at the core of the 3XS is the Opteron 144, and you just can't make an Opteron 144 PC and not overclock it; that's the law. Scan has done a good job with this, upping the speed of the CPU to 2.65GHz, thanks to a 295MHz FSB, which is slightly higher than we managed with our Opteron 144 in the CPU Labs test. While 2.65GHz isn't as fast as Opteron 144s are capable of running, it's still 50MHz faster than an Athlon 64 FX-55.
As the Opteron 144 invites gruelling clock speeds, you need a motherboard to really push it, and the first bone of contention with the 3XS is the choice of board. At the centre of the system is the Asus A8N-SLI Premium, and while it's capable of a 295MHz FSB, an Opteron 144 should be able to hit speeds well in excess of 2.8GHz when lovingly abused with the required voltage. Unfortunately, the A8N-SLI Premium isn't the best board to get its teeth into this particular task.
The other fly in the ointment for the 3XS is the RAM. It isn't often that you can complain that a gigabyte of Corsair XMS4400 isn't fast enough - after all, it's the fastest memory that Corsair makes - but as it can 'only' cope with a 275MHz FSB, in the 3XS, it doesn't run at a 1:1 ratio with the FSB. Instead, Scan has used a divider, so the memory actually runs at 240MHz. Scan should have used PC4800 instead.
Scan has upped the voltage of the CPU to 1.475V and used the Zalman CNPS9500LED HSF to cope with this. This cooler is more notable for its gigantic proportions and baffling name than for its ability to cool Athlon 64 CPUs, as its Socket 939 retention mechanism isn't that good. That said, it's certainly a lot better than the reference HSF. If you're overclocking any further, you're going to run into speed and heat issues with the memory well before the CPU overheats, so the HSF isn't a problem.
The cooler on the graphics card is quiet too, as it's the same model that Nvidia uses for its high-end Quadro cards and the GeForce 7800 GTX 512. The 3XS has a 256MB GeForce 7800 GTX, which is usually clocked slower than its 512MB successor, but Scan has overclocked it so that it runs faster. Simple, hey? The GPU runs at 500MHz - 70MHz faster than the GTX 512 - while the RAM runs at 650MHz (1.3GHz effective).
The cavernous Eclipse case is more than capable of holding a high number of drives, but the 3XS is a reasonably priced PC, so it sticks to a single hard disk, the 250GB Samsung SpinPoint P120S. It's fast and whisper-quiet, so it's a perfect choice. As usual, there are two optical drives, despite the fact that you haven't needed two for disc-to-disc copying since the early 1990s. These drives are the Asus DVD-E616A and the excellent Pioneer DVD-RW DVR110, a dual-layer burner. Another slightly excessive feature is the Seasonic S12-600 PSU, which is more than powerful enough for this PC. We're not complaining, though, because the S12-600 is excellent and will easily cope with any future upgrades. Sound is handled by the motherboard's ALC850 chip, which only supports basic AC97 audio.
PERFORMANCE
The Opteron 144 is a single-core CPU, but when overclocked, as you can see from the benchmarks, it's an absolute brute with very little respect for its far more expensive CPU betters. In the image editing test, the 3XS scored 1.45, whereas an Athlon 64 X2 4800+, which costs £538, scored 1.41. Even when working in Paint Shop Pro and compressing a huge RAR file in the background, the Opteron 144 OC is still faster than Intel's dual-core Pentium D 830 and the Athlon 64 FX-57, although it loses out to the dual-core AMD CPUs. Video encoding is always a slog on an AMD CPU, especially when it's a single-core CPU, but the 3XS is only slightly slower than the FX-57, scoring 0.64 to the FX-57's 0.67.
In gaming, the results are just as reassuring. Battlefield 2 has nothing whatsoever on the 3XS, which can run the game like the wind even with high levels of anisotropic filtering and a high resolution. F.E.A.R. isn't quite such a pushover, but even at 1,600 x 1,200, you can get a playable frame rate with 2x AA and 2x AF. With such a good CPU and GPU, there's no game the 3XS can't handle at the moment.
The nature of a stock overclocking job - that a PC has to be reliable - means that Scan hasn't pushed the PC to nosebleed-inducing speeds. We got the RAM working at a 1:1 ratio and the PC benchmarked successfully, giving it even quicker scores in the 2D benchmarks. Beyond this, however, although the PC would POST and load Windows, it wouldn't benchmark stably.
CONCLUSION
The build of this PC is masterfully executed, with no unnecessary widgets, plenty of room for upgrades, and a neatly executed wiring job, making it ideal as a solid base for an evolving system. It's just a shame there's so little room for overclocking beyond Scan's own settings. While the Opteron 144 is blessed with amazing overclocking abilities, its curse is that you need to top a 300MHz FSB to get its best performance, and to do this, you need some very focused overclocking kit. The 3XS isn't as sharp in this department as we'd like it to be. With this motherboard and RAM, Scan might have been better off using an Opteron 146, as its 10x multiplier means that it doesn't need such an outrageous FSB to hit a performance high.
Still, there's no denying that the 3XS is fast, and speed - for want of a better word - is good. Speed is right. Speed works. Speed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Speed, in all its forms, has marked the upward surge of mankind. And speed, mark our words, is what saves the 3XS. You can't deny the performance you get for the price, and while the 3XS doesn't deliver as much as we'd hoped, it still has the gumption to handle almost any modern game or intensive task.
Author: Phil Hartup
Scan 3XS Opteron 144 OC