Titanic gaming power in a tiny
package, matched by an equally huge and unpalatable price tag
We’re all for high-end PCs that push
hardware boundaries, so we salivated when the Scan 3XS Z77 Node Titan turned up
in the labs. It’s built around the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan, which is the
world’s most powerful single-core graphics card and the most expensive, too,
costing a mighty $1,280 inc VAT.
In fact, the Titan is so expensive that it
alone costs more than most PCs, and shunts the price of this system up above
$3,200. You can’t help but be impressed by its specifications, though: it
sports 2,688 stream processors, a number that far surpasses the 1,536 of
Nvidia’s previous flagship card (the GTX 680). It packs in double the number of
transistors, at a shade more than seven billion; and its 6GB of GDDR5 memory as
the most we’ve ever seen soldered to a graphics card.
Scan
3XS Z77 Node Titan
As a result, this Scan PC is a gaming
beast, brushing aside our 3D benchmarks with effortless ease. Its score of
93fps in the 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis test is a massive 18%
faster than the Wired2Fire HAL 4000. It’s enough to play any top title on any
single monitor at its maximum settings, and there’s enough grunt here to handle
demanding games across a trio of monitors too.
An overclocked processor means the Scan
doesn’t just excel in our games benchmarks. The 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-3770K has
been tweaked to run at 4.6GHz, and the 3XS romped through our application tests
to a score of 1.25. That’s on a par with the record-breaking Wired2Fire, which
used an overclocked Core i5 chip.
One area where the Scan’s performance can’t
match its rival is storage, however. The system’s single 256GB Samsung 840 SSD
can’t compete with the Wired2Fire’s twin SSDs arranged in RAID0. The Samsung
drive returned sequential read and write results of 514MB/sec and 247MB/sec;
the Wired2Fire scored 818MB/sec and 183MB/sec respectively.
Still, the Scan is one of the most powerful
machines we’ve ever seen, which is even more impressive given that it’s all
been squeezed into Fractal Design’s tiny Node 304 chassis. It’s the same case
used by the Wired2Fire, and it remains one of the most impressive
small-form-factor enclosures on the market. The brushed aluminum front looks
classy, and the plain-metal side panels - despite showing signs of a little
flex - will withstand trips to LAN parties.
The
Scan's chassis is compact and attractive
Scan has brought its famously fastidious PC
building to the pokey Fractal chassis. Cables run in lines along the bottom of
the case and others are tied neatly to the Node’s metal skeleton. For all the
company’s attention to detail, though, the small chassis means the internals
are tricky to access, and there isn’t much room for upgrades.
We’d advise against further overclocking,
too, since the chassis and configuration already struggle to keep the
components cool. At peak load, the overclocked processor hit a toasty peak
temperature of 92°C - only 13°C short of the chip’s thermal maximum - and the
graphics card’s peak of 82°C is high as well. Noise is less of an issue: the
Scan is louder during intensive benchmarking than the Wired2Fire, but cranking
up the volume on your speakers will quickly mask its rumble.
This
Scan is an excellent PC, then, and a Titan in more than just name. It’s the
fastest gaming PC it’s possible to imagine, incredibly quick in other areas,
and well put together, too
This Scan is an excellent PC, then, and a
Titan in more than just name. It’s the fastest gaming PC it’s possible to
imagine, incredibly quick in other areas, and well put together, too. But the
cost of the Nvidia GeForce Titan graphics card alone pushes the price up far
too high, and with the cheaper Wired2Fire matching its application and storage
benchmark results, you’d have to be mad to spend the extra.
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Key specs
- 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-3770K overclocked to 4.6GHz
- 16GB DDR3 RAM
- 256GB Samsung 840 SSD
- 2TB Seagate Barracuda hard disk Nvidia GeForce Titan graphics
- Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe motherboard
- Fractal Design Node 304 case
- 6 x USB 3
- 4 x USB 2
- optical S/PDIF
- 2 x eSATA
- Gigabit Ethernet
- dual-band 802.11abgn Wi-Fi
- 3yr RTB warranty
- Windows 8 64-bit 250 x 374 x 210mm
(WDH)
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