Reviews - Scan 3XS Z77 Node Titan

[HEXUS]

A Titan among small-form-factor gaming PCs?

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[MustardCutter]

Seems a nice piece of kit, will surely put my trinity itx build to shame, but all that does is play movies and surf the internet silently in the living room and isn't that what the ITX form factor is mostly used for? The size of the buid doesnt tend to have much impact in a study/office. I think with this kind of power an mATX or ATX would be better with more fans at lower speeds to keep noise down. But I guess this is a very niche product anyway.

[Tpyo]

At this sort of budget to make use of all that grunt - I'd be hoping for some sort of home server setup, whereby you had a monitor/kb/mouse combo and it would stream stuff from a full size uber'puter (that should also be there as extra grunt on demand for my laptop within the boundaries of my house + streaming stuff to my TVs). Give me an upgradeable full tower (+ appropriate software) that could do all these from the next room and the size/noise would be unimportant.

[MrBozack]

Too expensive, too noisy and too much power consumption. However I'm sure it's fast and it's a choice chassis.

I'd be interested to see how much cheaper that build would work out with a HD7970 instead...
:-D

[Apex]

Poor choice on the psu, i like the silverstone ones because you can get a short cable set which makes cable routing a lot less messy.

No choice of ATI/AMD cards ?

Overall a decent setup but the config options are a bit limiting.

[hero1]

That's one impressive build. I have the Titan, which replace my 2x Sapphire Dual-X HD 7970 that had trouble linking with each other now and then, and I am not looking back. I want to add another one and I pray to God I win the Hexus sweepstakes so I can 2 of them in my system. I play with 2560x1440p dell monitor and I have all the games turned up. I don't see my frames dip below 55 for any games, especialy Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3. Talk about power.

[Platinum]

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANT.

Will be using this case for my server build and now that there are good USB sound cards I think my next PC will be built around it as well.

[Philipp]

Poor choice on the psu, i like the silverstone ones because you can get a short cable set which makes cable routing a lot less messy.

How so?

Due to the size of chassis/GPU a large number of modular PSUs simply didn't fit.

On a modular PSU the connections are spread over the front of the PSU this meant that many are blocked by the titan card, on the Corsair GS they exit bottom right and as such clear.

Its also a solid PSU for the money that's more than capable of powering the system.

Cheers

[Philipp]

Too expensive, too noisy and too much power consumption. However I'm sure it's fast and it's a choice chassis.

I'd be interested to see how much cheaper that build would work out with a HD7970 instead...
:-D

Thanks for the feedback, unfortunately when building something so fast in something so small its always going to be expensive.

In this case noise and power consumption directly relate to chassis and performance, chassis is fixed (we offer normal ATX titan builds) and performance is outstanding for a system that size.... its worth noting that the CPU and GPU overclocks can be lowered affecting noise/power consumption.

Swapped with a HD7970 the system would cost £1475.16, we will be offering this config in a separate system shortly

Best Regards

[Philipp]

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANT.

Will be using this case for my server build and now that there are good USB sound cards I think my next PC will be built around it as well.

Yup gorgeous chassis, its built with real quality as well. Good job fractal!

[Myss_tree]

Am not a fan of the power button and usb ports on the side of cases.

[Apex]

How so?

Due to the size of chassis/GPU a large number of modular PSUs simply didn't fit.

On a modular PSU the connections are spread over the front of the PSU this meant that many are blocked by the titan card, on the Corsair GS they exit bottom right and as such clear.

Its also a solid PSU for the money that's more than capable of powering the system.

Cheers

Maybe "poor" was a poor choice of words . I wasn't aware of the routing issues you had with this, my own choice for a SFF build would be one of the Silverstone Striders with the short cable set to cut down on waste.

Overall i like the build and it's something i have said to a lot of folks over the years that you don't need a full tower to build a powerful rig; i guess my issues are related to my OCDness kicking in at the site of so much wasted wires in a rig

PS If it was my money I would want this with a ATI/AMD card, not a fan of the green side and havn't been for a very long time now.