Reviews - Scan 3XS i3 OC SMART Edition GTX 460 system review.

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£700 for a well-rounded system featuring NVIDIA's darling GPU. We put it to the test.

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No word on temperatures ?

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Originally Posted by Terbinator

No word on temperatures ?

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We have all the data logged, naturally, and if you think it's important to have temperatures for systems in forthcoming reviews we'll be happy to include them.

Scan 3XS

CPU idle temperature - 33°C
CPU load temperature - 74°C. (Prime95 on all cores)
GPU idle temperature - 33°C
GPU load temperature - 72°C (FurMark, 53 per cent fan speed)

Slightly unfair comparison I feel as the new chip is overclocked to 4ghz and the other one is at stock - been nice to see it going against say an overclocked Q6600 ....

Can the CPU cooler be oriented the opposite way in this system as surely that makes more sense? I have a arctic cooling freezer 64 pro that looks very similar to the cooler used and that can be mounted to exhaust out of the case (aided by a 120mm fan) instead of blowing over the ram. I guess you could reverse the fan directions though after a while the air at the back would probably be too hot to use as intake.

Thanks for the review, that was interesting, looks like a cool system.

This is not a criticism of the review, but for me and (I would imagine) a good many Hexites, a comparison against a Q6600 system would be very welcomed - lots of us are still hanging on to ours and would love to see a reason to upgrade.
Cheers!

Perhaps a general 'do you need to upgrade?' article would be cool, maybe investigating where the best bang for buck could come from in such upgrades (ie.. graphics card :p).

Might not go down too well with manufacturers though if you show that a 3 year old system is for all intents and purposes just as good as a new one :p

But this is a very nice, balanced system. Kudos to SCAN for putting the budget where it counts - I can't think of a single thing I'd change.

is the air flow in that case setup with cool air being sucked in from the back? if not then is that Freezer pro setup correctly? I thought that the fan on the Freezer sucked air?

**edit**

Very nice system though! I think I may get a 3XS system next rather than build it myself.

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Originally Posted by Jay

is the air flow in that case setup with cool air being sucked in from the back? if not then is that Freezer pro setup correctly? I thought that the fan on the Freezer sucked air?

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Nope, it blows in the direction of the fins by default. (at least, rev 1 does).

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Originally Posted by kalniel

Perhaps a general 'do you need to upgrade?' article would be cool, maybe investigating where the best bang for buck could come from in such upgrades (ie.. graphics card :p).

Might not go down too well with manufacturers though if you show that a 3 year old system is for all intents and purposes just as good as a new one :p

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I'd agree that would be interesting - that's speaking as someone who is hanging on to an old Q6600 system :mrgreen:

For what I use it for now, I'm confident the CPU/Mboard upgrade isn't worth it, for me. But would be interesting to see what the real world difference is likely to be - personally, I think synthetics should be avoided if Hexus did run with that idea for an article.

On the core i3 530 vs Q6600, I built an i3 530 system as an upgrade to the old P4 system that my other half was using. When spec'ing up the build, I was quite surprised to see that, iirc, the core i3 trades blows with the Q6600 depending (again, iirc) on whether you were doing something that was truly multithreaded or not

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Originally Posted by GaryRW

I'd agree that would be interesting - that's speaking as someone who is hanging on to an old Q6600 system :mrgreen:

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That's not old :p I'm still using a skt 939 based system :p

+1 to Kalniels suggestion for an article on the upgrade question, although the answer to that question for him is a most definate YES :p

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Originally Posted by Biscuit

+1 to Kalniels suggestion

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Hey! I said it first, although Kalniel added his own words..:mad:
<<Humph...>>

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Originally Posted by kalniel

Perhaps a general 'do you need to upgrade?' article would be cool, maybe investigating where the best bang for buck could come from in such upgrades (ie.. graphics card :p).

Might not go down too well with manufacturers though if you show that a 3 year old system is for all intents and purposes just as good as a new one :p

But this is a very nice, balanced system. Kudos to SCAN for putting the budget where it counts - I can't think of a single thing I'd change.

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To be honest, the one thing I'd change would be the graphics card - the GTX 460 may be the best bang for buck of the current generation, but surely you could put in a last-generation card that offers similar performance but is cheaper - because it's last generation. I wouldn't recommend doing the same with the processor but the graphics card is easily upgradeable and doesn't have to last as long as the other components. In my opinion, anyway :)

Temperature comparisons between architectures are actually fairly pointless. For example, an i7 running at 75ºC load is perfectly OK, but a Q6600 at 75ºC is perilously close to its thermal limits. I guess it's nice to have the figures in the review so those who care know they're not going to be treading too close to the line before they buy, but an actual comparison? I'm not convinced.

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Originally Posted by miniyazz

To be honest, the one thing I'd change would be the graphics card - the GTX 460 may be the best bang for buck of the current generation, but surely you could put in a last-generation card that offers similar performance but is cheaper - because it's last generation.

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Can you still buy last generation cards? Remember Scan have to be able to source them for a while - no good offering a system that you run out of components for because they were already EOL when you put the system together.

But even so, I don't think I would - the strong AMD position means I don't think we're paying much of an early adopter premium for the 460 at all - it's about the right price for the market segment already IMHO.

Looking on Scan, you can still buy 8 series (albeit limited choice) and 9 series graphics cards, so I'm going to have to say yes :)
Although of course they are clearing old stock, and you're probably right that it doesn't make sense for them to use last generation hardware.