Reviews - Scan 3XS GTK SLI Intel Sandy Bridge system review

[HEXUS]

Featuring huge clocks on both the CPU and graphics cards, does this PC set a new standard? We find out.

Read more.

[Tattysnuc]

... folding performance...?

It's good to see that an SLI rig heavily overclocked is being compared to a single card rig at stock speeds. The pros and cons are missing something... The SLI rig cannot be upgraded any further, whereas the X58 board will almost certainly be able to take SLI or even TRI sli. I'd argue based on that, that they are meant for entirely different markets...

I am pleasantly surprised to see that the frame rate in SLI is seriously enhanced by SLI at HD resolutions.

Good write up otherwise...

[andyb123]

maybe I'm being blind, but this articles doesn't mention what the GPU overclock is set at, and neither does the Scan sales page for this product...

[CK_1985]

<snip> The SLI rig cannot be upgraded any further, whereas the X58 board will almost certainly be able to take SLI or even TRI sli. I'd argue based on that, that they are meant for entirely different markets... <snip>

To be fair, I don't think the review is trying to judge which one of these two PCs you should buy - obviously, if you can afford the £3,000 one you wouldn't even be looking at the £1,300 one - but instead the X58-based machine is included to put the performance of the review machine into perspective.

Either way I'd say it's undeniable that this machine offers a staggering amount of performance for your money

[Parm]

maybe I'm being blind, but this articles doesn't mention what the GPU overclock is set at, and neither does the Scan sales page for this product...

andyb, the details are buried in the first page:

"Scan opts for two pre-overclocked GTX 560 Ti cards from EVGA and pushes them farther, to 900MHz core and 4,056MHz memory"

We'll update the specification table to make it a little clearer.

[Tunnah]

... folding performance...?

It's good to see that an SLI rig heavily overclocked is being compared to a single card rig at stock speeds. The pros and cons are missing something... The SLI rig cannot be upgraded any further, whereas the X58 board will almost certainly be able to take SLI or even TRI sli. I'd argue based on that, that they are meant for entirely different markets...

I am pleasantly surprised to see that the frame rate in SLI is seriously enhanced by SLI at HD resolutions.

Good write up otherwise...

why can't it be upgraded further ? if you had the single card setup you can only add another one of those cards (£500) but by the time this is actually needed we'll be 2 or 3 generations down the road and £500 would probably buy you 2 new cards that would have better performance than SLI'ing your current single card

also then you have 2 cards you can ebay and get some money back

[jamadaia]

Watercooling and / or modular supply would have been sweet but its pretty good value as it is.

[Lucio]

One thing I'd love to see in these articles is not just a decibel based reading for noise, but a sound recording file for both. It'd also be great to introduce this for graphics card reviews as sometimes it's not just the volume, but the pitch that you need to consider.