Scan 3XS Great White

Verdict: Scan proves that Steven Spielberg chose the right fish to star in 'Jaws'.

The Great White is Scan's fourth entry into our annual Dream PC Labs test, and evidence of its evolution can be found in the company's earlier water-cooled systems. The Chameleon (2005) was sprayed with chromatic paint that changed colour as the case warmed up, and the Black Rhino (2006) was covered in imitation rhino skin, while the White Cobra (2007) was painted pearlescent white.

For its next big leap forward, Scan has electroplated the Silverstone TJ07 case with chromium to give it a lustrous chrome finish. The result is a visually stunning case that positively glows with energy and light. Chrome is much harder wearing than paint, so the finish should last a lot longer than a painted PC's. The only downside is that chrome attracts fingerprints like nectar attracts bees, although Scan has thoughtfully provided a jar of polish and a special cloth for cleaning the case. To achieve the high-quality finish, Scan has chrome-plated all the interior surfaces, too. Unlike a lot of Dream PCs, the Great White isn't adorned with coloured flashing lights. Instead, it uses clean white LEDs, and as they're all USB-powered, they can be turned on/off individually in Windows (except for the lights in the LED fans).

Out of the box, the SilverStone TJ07 is our favourite case for water cooling. However, Scan has made further improvements by enlarging the grille in the roof, providing space for a triple 120mm-fan radiator. Fitted with white LED fans, this radiator has the job of cooling the massively overclocked Core 2 Quad Q9650 CPU. It may seem a little strange to use a non-Extreme Edition CPU in a Dream PC, but as the Q9650 has a later stepping than the QX9650 Extreme Edition, it's a better overclocker. As a result, Scan has managed to overclock the Great White's Q9650 from its stock speed of 3GHz to 4.41GHz by raising the FSB from 333MHz to 490MHz. This necessitated boosting the vcore to 1.6125V, although under load, this appeared to droop by at least 0.1V. To ensure that the CPU has plenty of memory bandwidth, the Great White includes 4GB of Corsair DDR3 clocked to a heady 1.96GHz at 9-9-9-24 timings. DDR3 consumes less power than DDR2, but due to the hefty overclock in the Great White, the DIMMs need to be cooled by a Corsair Dominator fan module.

Loop-the-loop

To achieve such a high FSB, the Great White's EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard is fully water-cooled, with the Northbridge, Southbridge and VRMs all sitting under a combination of MIPs and Aqua Computer waterblocks. The waterblocks are cooled by a single 120mm fan-radiator that lurks in the lower section of the case. This radiator also has to cool the giant Aquadrive waterblock that cools the three 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F1 drives. The first two drives are configured in RAID 0 and have 64-bit Vista pre-installed, while the last drive acts as a backup. The 1TB SpinPoint F1 is one of the fastest hard disks available, but in case that isn't good enough for you, there are also two 64GB OCZ SSD flash drives arranged in RAID 0. The resulting 128GB array is perfect for installing games, as the SSDs are much quicker at reading data than hard disks. Crysis and ArmA, two games with particularly huge levels, loaded extremely quickly. If you're worried about your data being split across all those RAID 0 arrays, Scan also provides a fourth 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F1 in an external caddy for backing up your precious collection of photos of rare spores and fungi.

ATI has made a massive comeback with the HD 4000-series, but the Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 is still the ultimate GPU. Considering the pounding we gave 3-way SLI in July, fitting three GTX 280 cards in the Great White, as Scan has, is a brave step. All three are water-cooled, which is why the Great White is so much quieter than the HP Blackbird. The full-coverage Aqua Computer waterblocks also enabled Scan to overclock the GPUs from 602MHz to 710MHz, the stream processors from 1.296GHz to 1.458GHz and the memory from 1.107GHz (2.214GHz effective) to 1.25GHz (2.5GHz effective). The cards are linked in the same water-cooling loop, and cooled by a triple 120mm-fan radiator in the bottom of the case.

Fitting three graphics cards usually means there's no room for other expansion cards, but Scan has managed to squeeze in two other cards. The first is a Killer NIC M1 networking card, a genuinely innovative product that decreases your ping in online games, while the second is the 1x PCI-E version of the Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro. In order to squeeze in this last card, Scan has had to remove the black plastic shroud that usually covers the PCB, although as its presence is purely cosmetic, it's no great loss.

Unlike a lot of PCs, the monitor supplied with the Great White doesn't feel like an afterthought. The 24in Zalman Trimon ZM-M240W is a good deal smaller than the enormous 30in display supplied with the HP Blackbird, but it has an ace up its sleeve - stereoscopy. This technique uses the power of two slightly offset panels and a special pair of polarised glasses to trick the brain into seeing games and movies in true 3D. Not all games and movies support stereoscopy, but in the ever-increasing list of titles that do, such as Call of Duty 4, the effect is truly stunning. Support for 3D in games requires a compatible driver, but while in the past Nvidia has been lax at keeping its 3D monitor-supporting drivers up-to-date, the company seems far keener on doing so at the moment.

The Great White bundle also includes the updated version of the Logitech G15 keyboard, the ultimate gaming mouse - the Logitech G9, a set of Logitech Z-5500 Digital speakers and 5.1 SpeedLink Medusa headset. The entire system is powered by a 1kW Corsair HX1000W PSU, which won our recent PSU Labs test.

Performance

With such a brutally overclocked CPU and DDR3 memory, you'd expect the Great White to be as ferocious with our benchmarks as the real Great White is with its prey. In reality, Scan's machine exceeded our expectations, completing the video encoding benchmark with a score of 2,595 - just a couple of points shy of an overclocked Skulltrail rig. Combined with the image editing and multitasking test results, the Great White scored 1,772 overall, making it the fastest commercially available PC ever, and earning 19th place on the benchmark leaderboard (www.custompc.co.uk/benchmarks).

It would appear that Nvidia still has its work cut out with 3-way SLI - while the Great White rocketed through both 3DMark tests, its performance in games wasn't nearly as impressive. This doesn't mean it isn't fast, however; thanks to the massive overclock, it could play all our games at 1,920 x 1,200, and is a good deal faster than the HP Blackbird.

However, all that performance comes at a price. When fully stressed, the Great White draws an incredible 1,083W of electricity from the wall, while the CPU temperature peaked at an almost incandescent 93ûC. Although the three water-cooling loops and the Corsair PSU kept the Great White perfectly stable throughout our stress tests, Scan has clearly pushed all the components to within a couple of atomic layers of their lives. Fortunately, the system's heady price includes a two-year warranty.

Conclusion

It's fairly common knowledge that the great white shark, or Carcharodon carcharias, is an apex predator and swims the world's oceans unchallenged. As the HP Blackbird is so underwhelming and Armari may not be able to mass-produce the XCP, the result of this year's Dream PCs Labs test is more clear-cut than ever before - the Great White wins hands down. This isn't to say that the Great White isn't an awesome system in its own right - the chrome finish and white LEDs give it a more grown-up feel than many of the excessively illuminated PCs we've seen. Our only concern is that the very high voltages and operating temperature may affect long-term reliability, although as with any 3XS system, the Great White is covered by a comprehensive warranty.