Need help with 3XS build and some questions :)

[Philipp]

Mikex,

Thats great to hear, If you wish PM me your invoice/build number and Ill get some pictures put up here for you also

Ruben will be reciving his system this morning, and it looks much better in the flesh

Cheers

[mikex]

Ah brilliant Philipp, I need more posts before I can PM but will do when I can, cheers

[TAKTAK]

Ruben will be reciving his system this morning,

/me thinks he's going to be MIA for a while

to busy ogling

[Philipp]

Ah brilliant Philipp, I need more posts before I can PM but will do when I can, cheers

philipp@scan.co.uk

Keep posting mind, cracking community and you will also qualify for free carriage from scan

Cheers

[Philipp]

/me thinks he's going to be MIA for a while

to busy ogling

True true, wonder if he made it in work this afternoon

[yupyupno]

Haha, i'm still here

Reluctantly i have to leave for work at 3, won't be home till around 10

Anyway....

It arrived at 9.04am this morning, so gald i didn't pay for the pre 9 shipping

It looks amazing!
So heavy, but the performance is incredible

Not done many benchmarks, still installing the games, but Far Cry 2, max settings at 1080p, 80fps average
23719 vantage score

GTA4 max settings, but textures medium 68fps average

installed Crysis Warhead, but no benchmarks yet.

I'll have some pictures up later on tonight, gonna borrow a camera from work

Other than that, fantastic first impressions

i'll have a proper review a little later when i finish making it all perfect

Thanks Scan!

[TAKTAK]

Must be happy... look at the amount of similies

[yupyupno]

yeah

Kind of gutted that i'm stuck in the office till 8pm though

[Paul Boy]

So what are your final spec's and how much did it cost you?

[yupyupno]

Final specs:

Case: Coolermaster RC-1100 V2 Cosmos S (Sport) Black Silent Full Tower Case (£137.00)
Motherboard: Asus Rampage II Extreme, Intel X58, Sok 1366 (£264.97)
CPU: Intel i7 920, Nehalem, 2.66GHz, 4.8GT/s QPI, 8MB Cache, Retail (£207.17)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 Exclusive Dual Fan CPU Cooler (£45.39)120mm Noctua
Oveclocking: 3XS System Core-Logic Overclocking *10 - 20%* (£80.00)
Memory: 6GB (3x2GB) Corsair Dominator DDR3, PC3-12800 (1600) CAS 8 (£199.12)
Graphics card: 1GB XFX GTX 280, 2210MHz GDDR3, 602MHz GPU, 240 Cores (Far Cry2 Included while stocks last) (£269.28)
PSU: 1000W Corsair HX Series Modular (Dual Graphics Cards SLI / Crossfire) (£159.10)
System Drives: 300 GB Western Digital WD3000GLFS VelociRaptor, 10000 rpm, 16MB Cache (£195.22)
Storage Drives: 1000 GB Western Digital WD1001FALS Caviar Black, 7200 rpm, 32MB Cache (£86.85)
Flash Drive: Akasa 3.5" Internal Multi Memory Card reader & USB 2.0 Port (£7.59)
DVD Writer: LG GGC-H20L - Super Multi DVD Writer & Blu-Ray + HD-ROM Reader (£55.80)
Case Cooling Fans: 3 x 120mm Coolermaster Internal Case Fan with RED LED (£14.91)
No Sound card
OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64Bit (£76.89)
(already have GTX 280, so its in SLI now)
(CPU overclocked to 3.6ghz, i think with turbo boost, goes to the 3.7ghz when needed)

Came to around £2000, which seems like alot, but when you earn £5k a week its nothing... i wish haha

Its alot but i think i wont have to touch it for around 2-3 years, so that works out to around £1.83 a day for 3 years, that was the key for me.
Plus the buy now pay later scheme came in handy, if i was going to pay for it in one lump sum, the specs would have been lower, so its around £200 i have to save each month till October, which is better than me going outside and spending it on drugs and hanging out on street corners lol

if anything, i can only see me needing to upgrade the graphics cards and add maybe one more 1tb drive, but 2 gtx280's in sli is more than enough, was trying my old 8800gt, and that thing can still move todays games well.

I'll have a more indepth review of it all, close ups of the system so you can see the cabling, idle temps and under load, etc

[Zak33]

tbh, for the sheer effort, quality of customer service, and the final build, it's worth £2000 all day long.. and as you say, it'll still be urinating all over the latest games in years time

Because I'm a sad old boy, I'm interested in how quiet or noisy it all is? And how's the air flow moving?

[samcross]

Quick question for a n00b, is it safe to assemble the components on a cardboard box?

[yupyupno]

The Scan 3XS system review.

First things first, if you are looking at putting a system together, but are still undecided, as a customer of two 3XS systems, I would highly recommend you purchase one, in fact I’ll come round your house and press the order button for you!

That is probably the highest compliment I could offer to Scan and the 3XS team.

Ordering the system couldn’t have been easier, and with the dedicated forum, it makes things so much better. It allows other users to hand out useful tips and opinions, and gives you direct contact with the staff who help guide you in making the right decisions.

Seeing as the dedicated forum is relatively new, I’m the first customer to have a system built and shipped through it, so I feel that I should be totally honest and clear, so others can make the right choices.

If you’re wondering why Scan have won best retailer for the last 4 or so years, I hope you’ll be able to see why, as my opinion of them is nothing but glowing.
From the telephone calls, emails, pm’s and tucking me into to bed..okay I made that one up, they’ve been absolutely outstanding. When you’re paying as much for a complete system, you should expect nothing less, and Scan go above and beyond in helping you with your purchase.

Down to the system now, well, its comes in the biggest box you could imagine.
Think bubble wrap, then add more bubble wrap, and then you have an idea of how much protection this thing comes in.


The box, big enough to fit a human haha


After opening the box, and all taking out everything, you are left with your shiny new PC, there are warnings all over the boxes to take out the bubble wrap from within the case.
Its like watching a clown pull out the cloth from his sleeve, its never ending bubble wrap inside, at least you know the innards are well protected.


Fresh out of the box

Time to look at the goodies, the motherboard box is also sent with the system, with all the necessary cables and other things should you wish to add anything else to it, it also comes with the Corsair PSU cables in a lovely pouch.

Only thing I couldn’t find was a dvi to hdmi converter, there was dvi to vga, but I guess XFX don’t ship with that.

Now this thing is heavy! I mean heavy. The Cosmos S case is beautiful to behold, clean and stylish finish, with a rigid build, exactly what I was looking for.

Looking inside, everything is as neat as neat can be, no loose cabling, all lovingly managed and clear of clutter. Another high five to Scan here, they knew I already have a GTX 280, so they asked if I would like them to add the 6 and 8 pin cables to the system, so I wouldn’t have to do it myself and ruin the cabling.
So when I opened the case, the cables were waiting there for the 280, so no unwarranted loose cabling on my behalf. Now that’s service!





After hooking everything up, I turned on the machine finally…
The red LED’s of the fans makes for a truly spectacular sight, lighting up the case and making everything that little more special.




I was expecting it to go straight to Windows, but was met with a BIOS screen asking me to load default settings or load one from a profile. I had assumed that it would automatically load the overclocked profile, but I had to do this manually.
The BIOS screen is something to marvel at, and also fear!
So many options, so many things to break :s

As I had asked for it to be overclocked, I was emailed a day before with the exact settings they used to get it to 3.6ghz from 2.6ghz. I found this very useful as I intend to do a little tweaking, so being able to fall back on the exact settings, (if the OC Profile was deleted, or if I needed to clear the CMOS etc) was a Godsend.

Now having loaded settings, and checking in the BIOS that the changes had been made, I was able to load into Windows.

As most of us would, we put all our essential drivers onto a USB stick and do the important things, before we mess around with it. First thing that I think Scan should do, is install WinRar with the system, I know its not much and there are probably legal issues, but having it straight out of the box would have helped a little.

Installing the anti-virus, new graphics drivers was a breeze, only issue I had was getting the wireless usb adapter to install, had to do an Ethernet connection in the end to get the wireless to work.

On the desktop are all the results of the testing they’ve carried out, from Prime to 3D Mark 06, I think Vantage should be used now, as that is more popular and gives a better indication of overall performance.

As with everything, I’ve begun installing all my software, from games to Photoshop, and with the amount of space, its hard to know which drives they should go on.
The best games will go on the VelociRaptor, the rest will have to be placed elsewhere.
Talking about the VelociRaptor, it boots up to Windows extremely fast, I’d say around a minute.

I know this review is getting a little on the long side, but I’ve decided to be as in depth as I can, not leave anything out so you can see what you’re buying.

I’ll start to look at performance and temperatures now.

On the Windows System rating, it scores a 5.9, it should really, but we all know that is not the greatest benchmark.

On my first run in 3D Mark Vantage, on performance settings, it scored a respectable 23761 (check screen)
Vantage second run came in a little lower at 23708, I haven't installed the new PhysX drivers yet, so that may bump the score up a little bit.

Now for a computer designed for everyday use, I think that is fantastic, the top score is around 35000, but we all know that is an extreme overclocked score, those kinds of clock speeds will not be used day to day. So the 23,761 does look very good indeed.

Far Cry 2 came shipped with the XFX card, I’ve already bought the game so used my version (Far Cry 2 for sale anyone?), on my first bench, with everything set to as high as you could put it, in DX10 running 1920x1080, the average was 76.39fps.
Astonishing!

Crysis with all the bells a whistles turned on gave me 53.215fps average,

EDIT (Both Far Cry 2 and Crysis were run with 8xAA)

Everyone had problems with GTA 4 when it first came out, not any more, 65.57fps average, turned everything as high as I could, only textures remained medium. There is a command line to bypass this lock, so I'll try it again later.

If any of you guys play FSX, I'll try and do a bench for you, its will take a while to install, so that will come a little further down the line.

The air flow is pretty good, you stick your hand inside, and it is rather cool in there.
The only downside is that the CPU cooler is rather tall, so I am unable to use the 200mm fan that comes on the side panel.
I may have to buy a couple of extra fans to increase the cooling.





The temps idle around 46c-47c, when under Prime, they go up to 83c-84c.
I only run prime for about 15mins, have my mouse hovering over the close button as the temps look a little dangerous, but the I7's do run hot, I've read many people have temps as high as the 90c's, so it really shouldn't be a cause for concern, I'm just being protective of my new toy.

This brings me on to noise.
The PC itself is quieter that expected, the only real noise of any note is coming from the graphics cards. Being stacked so close together, you can expect them to get a little toasty, I will have to consider an alternative method into cooling them, but for now, I’m just happy everything has come altogether with the greatest of ease.

Also one thing that i'm sure most of you would be happy about is that the system already has the awful UAC disabled, so no pop-ups if you want to open a file, or the big red cross annoying you, that again is a very nice touch.

I'm struggling to think what else I can write about, the system is extremely well put together, a lot of thought has gone into the cabling and packaging, and the customer service has been second to none.

Its come with a Blu-ray player, but I haven't had a chance to compare the picture quality with my PS3, I assume that it would be better as the Nvidia software will make the images sharper and more vibrant.

There really isn't anything you could fault with it, it may be a little tad expensive, but that's what you pay for a premium service and top of the line products.

I guess my only gripe would be adding any more hard drives, I did notice that the sata ports were taken up, and the cabling being fastened down means that I will struggle to add another drive. There is another spare port just to the side of where the main ports are, but it does mess things up a bit.

All in all, its a fabulous piece of kit, very expensive in today's climate, but worth every penny, as I won't have the illusion of playing games broken by slowdowns.
Above everything else, the highest minimum frame rate is what I was after, and with just the few hours I've had with it now, all the research and money invested has been justified.


PRO's
Unbelievable power
Great customer service
Almost perfect presentation
Will last a good 2-3 years before anything needs upgrading

CON's
A little expensive
Will spend the next few days inside like a hobit

10/10












Its new home



My veiw of it all

Hope you found the review and pics enjoyable and useful

Let me know what you think

Cheers Ruben

[moogle]

Quick question for a n00b, is it safe to assemble the components on a cardboard box?

Yes, I don't see why not it isn't going to short the motherboard pins on the rear.

[samcross]

Thanks moogle

[TAKTAK]

Quick question for a n00b, is it safe to assemble the components on a cardboard box?

Yup, it is (arguably) unsafe to build on antistatic bags though, as the outside of the bag is where the charge is dissipated too and is conductive.

Cardboard however, isn't


And that first image made me LOL