Reviews - Scan 3XS Cyclone SLI

[HEXUS]

Is Scan's £3,000 gaming PC as good as it looks?

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[danroyle]

normally i'd say great review and nice looking PC. However today i cant. I dont understand the choice of comparison pc's none of them are anything like the scan one. A like for like spec competitor system would have been nice. £1850 being the most expensive you should stick another 580 in that one and run it again as that would be a £2200ish system and probably be pretty close for performance

[kalniel]

but it's a shame Scan doesn't provide the option to liquid-cool the CPU.

I suggested this configuration back when the GTX 480 came out and scan originally had a water cooled CPU but aircooled 480s. The GPUs will pump out more heat than the CPU, and the high volume space (and airflow directions) available for CPU cooling means it's much better suited to air cooling, and can assist general system/moetherboard cooling, while the GPUs are better under water.

[Tunnah]

liquid cooling CPUs is so unnecessary as air coolers perform equally as well (give or take a few degrees) without having to install radiators, piping etc.

great rig great setup, love these high end boutique things but there is 1 massive problem with this - 1.5gb frame buffer is no way near enough for a rig of this power.

whoever buys this is going to marry it to (at least 1) 2560x1600 monitor (if you don't you're just a tit frankly) and will expect to be able to ramp up the AA, and at those resolutions 1.5gb is just not enough, especially since anyone buying this will not be expecting to have to upgrade for 3 years at least

[Tattysnuc]

I'm disappointed by the lack of a water based CPU cooling option as this means a "noisy" pair of fans on the CPU. Overkill maybe, but for 3k, surely you want the very best as opposed to nearly the best.

Otherwise, this looks like an extremely attractive PC, with a heck of a price tag. Certainly not value for money, but top end rigs rarely are.

When are they going to replace their Jellyfish model? That's quite old hat now - I'm hoping that refresh is linked with the new Socket 2011 release...

[Philipp]

Hi Tatty,

Thanks for your feedback, adding the CPU into the waterloop means that the graphics cards would dump heat onto the CPU. The solution to this would be to have a dual loop system as in our 3XS White Tiger, however adding another loop into this chassis would increase the cost considerably not to mention this chassis doesn’t lend itself very well to dual loops.

Another point to consider is even with a watercooled sandy bridge CPU you won’t actually get much more performance from it, 4.7Ghz is about the limit you can push a 2600k without compromising on stability (this system passed 24hours+ running prime 95 and furmark).

Cheers

[Roobubba]

This looks like a great system. My only reservation - from my own perspective here - is that a big part of the fun of computing for me (and many people I know) is the putting together of my system myself. If I had that much money to burn, I'd love to put together a similar system, but I certainly wouldn't consider buying one pre-made, even if money were no object (surely the market a £3k system is aiming at).

Obviously there are people who don't enjoy putting their systems together, and to those this is clearly a nice system to go for - don't take my post as a negative one

Roo

[PeteG@Scan]

I'm disappointed by the lack of a water based CPU cooling option as this means a "noisy" pair of fans on the CPU. Overkill maybe, but for 3k, surely you want the very best as opposed to nearly the best.

Just from a psycho acoustic angle a central air cooler can be quieter than fitting another radiator. The heat sink is fairly central to the machine so the noise can be defused inside of the box. As soon as you fit another rad you have to use a higher speed fan (to account for the tighter fins on the rad blocking more of the air flow) next to the vents (so increased sound leakage) so the result can actually be louder than just going with an air cooling solution.

Obviously you need to choose the cooler/fan selection well and the and you don't get as much heat to the outside section of the case as quickly but as Phil mentions by having a source of air flow over the CPU you counteract the heat rising into the socket area by convection. The gains you see once you get over 4.7Ghz required the cranking up of the various voltages by a fair percentage to achieve so whilst in those instances another cooling loop would help you achieve another .3 - .5 GHz the financial cost and heat generation start to become major factors in the decision to do so.

[Hicks12]

Agreed with dan, bit of a terrible comparison HOWEVER if you take it as just a review about scans system then yeah its a pretty good review.

Love the use of good components guys, cant see many corners cut from my brief read . Im curious about your comment Philipp, i dont consider myself a wcing expert but i have been watercooling for a long time and a key note i remember is that a single loop with gpu+gpu+cpu would be fine, the water will reach equilibrium (sorry spelling is terrible, is this right?) very quickly providing you have a good pump which the ddc certainly is! Which is why its common knowledge that anywhere you position components in the loop it will only affect temperatures by a max of 1C.

Im thinking its more to do with the case itself being limiting, as you have managed to cram a boat load in there! The radiator would be reaching near max load to dissipate efficiently, im going to assume its an XSPC RS240 as it looks to thin to be the bigger brother RX (please correct me if wrong, image deceiving), from my previous estimations i think the max the rs could take was like 300W TDP thats with a 15C temp above ambient, im not sure what tdp spec is for the 580 but i presume its like 200w+ each and overclocked is nearing 300w, obviously as the cards are hitting 80C (graphs werent labelled properly unless im blind...) then i presume adding an overclocked cpu would just tip temps to far into hot.

Now dont take my comment as being bad or anything, i think its brilliant that you guys have use quality components (bits power are good but maybe a bit to much premium and the xspc rads are top notch), and your presentation is excellent! I can only pray for one day i can take the time and somehow get some skill to do all the braiding and make it look as organised as this rig.

Out of interest, is the DDC always ran at 12v (i.e full speed)?

PS: nice to see using some Akasa Apache fans, the alternative being gentle typhoons but both are great low noise fans so good choice!

[saltyzip]

Is this actually going to play any game better than a £1000 PC, law of diminishing returns?

[ShavedApe]

Is this actually going to play any game better than a £1000 PC, law of diminishing returns?

Yes in terms of level load speeds etc and yes in terms of graphics settings too. Will be capable for sure of hitting ultra settings in battlefield 3 later this month for eg.

Personally I would rather see some crucial SSD's in there force gt's might look good on paper but the sheer amount of issues people have with them overshadows how good they might look on paper. Im on my second and it frequently causes bsod and then is missing from bios till i hard reset. Im only hoping the new firmware will fix that.

[kookjobs]

review not bad, should be add something dymamic