Vadim Cepheus RQ80

Verdict: An updated version of the 2006 Dream PC, just in time for Vista

Although good reviewers approach every new product with an open mind, you know that at the start of the month, when the editor dishes out the kit to be covered, certain assignments are more highly prized than others. When the NME editor opens his post and cries 'Finally! That album of jazz-infused Irish folk music from Ronan Keating is in, and it's a three CD set! Hands up who wants it?', you know the assembled hacks will suddenly be studying their laces and waiting for him to move on to the new Arctic Monkeys single. Similarly, when the editor of Evo is handing out the car keys, you can bet journalists jumping for the new Ferrari far outnumber the takers of the latest Daihatsu.

For CPC, a new PC from Vadim, the company that built the 2006 Dream PC is an eagerly awaited item - we don't assume that it will be good, but you can't ignore the lineage of the new Cepheus RQ80. For a PC, the RQ80 even starts up in a manner surprisingly similar to that of a Lamborghini. Press the power switch, and through the side panel's window you can see the interior light up. The ten 120mm fans judder slightly before roaring for a second or two at full speed as the system POSTs. As the PC accelerates into the boot sequence, the mCubed T-Balancer bigNG calms them to a low growl and, before you know it, it's in Windows.

It isn't surprising that the RQ80 boots quickly - like the original Dream PC Cepheus, it runs its operating system from a pair of 150GB Raptor 150s in RAID 0. Two 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10s provide storage space, and run in RAID 1, with one mirroring the other for data security. Our review machine had Windows XP installed but, by the time you read this, it will be available with Vista.

The RQ80 is the first PC we've seen with dual GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards and, as you'd expect from Vadim, they're cooled by an intricate water-cooling system. Waterblocks for the GeForce 8800-series are few and far between at the moment so, for the time being, the RQ80 uses SilenX ones. Their GPUs are overclocked from 575MHz to 630MHz, and the memory runs at 1GHz (2GHz effective), up from 900MHz. Also being cooled by the water-cooling system is a quad-core CPU, an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700, overclocked to 3.5GHz - nearly a gigahertz away from its stock speed of 2.66GHz. The FSB has been raised to 292MHz, and the chip's multiplier shifted up a few gears to 12x. To support the resulting increase in velocity, the voltage has been increased to 1.575V.

Compare these specs with those of the original Cepheus, with its dual-core CPU and Radeon X1900XT - CrossFire graphics, and it's clear the steady onwards march of PC technology continues as quickly as ever.

As this is an SLI system, the motherboard has changed too, from the CrossFire-supporting Intel 975X-based Asus P5W DH Deluxe, to the nForce 680i EVGA board. The Northbridge is water-cooled, but it's proved to be impossible to fit the Southbridge into the loop, so it has its own Thermalright HR-05 SLI heatsink with a 60mm fan, which sticks out from the motherboard between the two GeForce cards. The power supply has evolved from the 700W FSP to the massive 1kW Enermax Galaxy.

The Galaxy is physically bigger than other PSUs, and this, in conjunction with the increased heat output of the dual DirectX 10-compatible GPUs and the quad-core CPU, has necessitated an overhaul of the cooling system used in the Cepheus. Previously, in the bottom compartment of the Lian Li PC-V2100 Plus case, Vadim fitted two triple 120mm fan radiators. As the Galaxy is longer than a normal PSU, there's room for only one triple 120mm fan radiator and one dual 120mm fan radiator. However, Vadim has expanded the third radiator at the rear from a single 120mm fan unit to a dual. This has been accomplished by slicing through the metal plate that bisects the case's interior, so that the radiator sits just above the PSU. This makes the RQ80's liquid-cooling loop more evenly distributed, which is important, since it's this rear radiator that allows the water to cool down after hitting the CPU and Northbridge, before it heads to the graphics cards. As well as the 120mm fan cooling the 2GB of A-Data 1,066MHz RAM, there's a 120mm fan over the graphics cards, cooling the top half of the motherboard. There's a 120mm fan at the front, which, when you open the case door, has a slotted front panel through which to draw air. As before, there's a tiny 40mm fan cooling the VRMs, giving the PC 12 system fans - 14 if you count the fans inside the PSU. Keeping these under control is the T-Balancer bigNG and, as before, it sits behind the drive bays.

The bigNG is an excellent fan controller, but there are more fans in the RQ80 than there was in the original Cepheus, and hotter hardware, so there's no doubt that it's a noisier PC. Since the Cepheus was exceptionally quiet, an increase in noise isn't terrible news, and you'd be hard-pushed to find a quieter 3.5GHz quad-core machine elsewhere. Still, the whooshing is audible and, on a related note, the Zalman hard disk cages have been replaced by simple rubber grommits. A Sound Blaster X-Fi and a pair of optical drives (one DVD writer and, oddly, a plain old CD writer), and a floppy disk drive round off the spec.

PERFORMANCE

Not surprisingly, the RQ80 screamed through our benchmarks, although, in the image editing test, since its CPU is 100MHz slower and the test doesn't use multiple cores at all, it was slightly slower than the original Cepheus. In the DVD encoding test, the RQ80's score of 3.43 is terrifyingly quick. The RQ80's multitasking score is well down on the Cepheus though - 2.66 compared to 2.75. Vadim blames this on the EVGA's RAID controller, which is a likely culprit, since the drives in each are identical.

Even sitting idle in Windows, warm air comes out of the side of the RQ80; put the machine through the benchmarks and the air really heats up. Vadim's cooling system works hard, and this isn't surprising - when running four instances of Folding@home and 3DMark06, the RQ80 drew more than 700W from the socket.

Two overclocked GeForce 8800 GTXs are responsible for much of this heat, but in return they do give you an awesome amount of power. To give the two cards enough work to do, you'll need a 30in TFT screen, as a single GeForce 8800 GTX has no problems filling a 24in TFT on its own. It probably seems astonishing, but the RQ80 really is most comfortable gaming at 2,560 x 1,600 - well above the resolution most of us mere mortals play at. Prey was the one exception, but only because we couldn't convince the game to run at that setting, as it kept knocking us back down to 1,920 x 1,200. In the other titles, the action, driving and carnage remained fluid and simply gorgeous to look at - in Company of Heroes, the RQ80 was averaging more than 100fps. With these scores, it's hard to conceive of even a next-generation game such as Crysis or Alan Wake troubling the RQ80, although, of course, we've yet to see any DirectX10 game code running.

Throughout our testing, we doubled up the tests at the highest resolution, running each test once with the graphics cards in SLI, and once with one card disabled, to check if we really were testing both cards. The results show that Nvidia seems to be making decent progress with SLI, as at 2,560 x 1,600, it made a significant difference in all the games. F.E.A.R., of course, has always loved SLI, and its average is twice as high when running with two graphics cards, but even the two newest games we took for a spin, Company of Heroes and Need For Speed: Carbon, saw massive improvements. Only a year ago, SLI used to struggle to help out newer games, especially those that weren't first-person shooters, but at 2,560 x 1,600, NFS: Carbon is 40 per cent faster in SLI compared to running with a single card.

CONCLUSION

The original Cepheus was a massively impressive machine that really did deserve a comparison with a sports car such as a Lamborghini; its bold looks were matched with fearsome performance, and the new RQ80 version of the machine carries on this tradition, even if it's a little noisier and pricier - the original Cepheus cost £6,000, but came with surround-sound speakers and a 24in TFT. To the £5,000 cost of the RQ80, you'll need to add a 30in monitor (currently £1,000 from Scan), plus speakers, mouse and keyboard, and, of course, be able to support its electricity bill. It isn't for the poor - and judging its value is tricky - and while the bill is large, there aren't many companies and individuals who could build this kind of PC.

Cost aside, interesting challenges lie ahead for the Cepheus though, and if components get hotter this year, future machines may require bigger cases to accommodate the cooling. As it stands, though, this souped-up Cepheus is still one hell of a dream machine.