Introduction
Back in late June, Scan International invited HEXUS to its offices near the Reebok Stadium in Bolton, to take a look at a PC SKU which SCAN had spent significant time and money developing. As part of the development process, one of SCAN's head honchos decided that HEXUS input was to be part of the finalisation process for the product. Elan wanted to get our input on what we thought they were doing right with it, and what we thought they were doing wrong.
The SCAN Cool Chameleon married watercooled, overclocked FX-57 power, a pair of 512MiB NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics cards in SLI and a cool fixed disk configuration, all wrapped up in a very heavily customised chassis covered in heat-reactive paint. Their follow up to the SCAN 3XS Cobra SLI systems we covered back when SLI launched to critical acclaim, looked at back in June in very-nearly-done form was well received by the folks that read our piece on its development.
A couple of months have since past and SCAN have finished the beast off, tidying up the loose ends, buffing the awesome paint job up and sorting out the performance of the ASUS A8N-SLI based system to a point where they're happy to put it on sale. They recently sent the finished item over for our beady eyes to look over for our full evaluation. However the horrible pressures of being a technology journalists mean that we fly out to Ibiza, for the briefing on a product that'll likely find its way into the SCAN 3XS Cool Chameleon parts list at some point, tomorrow. Poor us, eh?
So while we sun ourselves by the pool with .pdfs and Long Island Iced Teas, We've decided to leave you with a snapshot look at the system as it was unboxed a couple of days ago. Before that is the author nearly killed himself taking the system up to his office - and I seriously mean that; I have steep stairs to get up here and the Chameleon weighs over 50 kilos fully laden with kit and coolant! We'll get round to the full evaluation as soon as we can after getting back to The Grey Isle from The White Isle.
Enjoy the pics and refer back to the the original first look if you want the full hardware spec. Not much has changed in the final polished version, basic hardware wise.
with an initial gradiated look more impressive than on the 'beta' chassis
cage that holds the 360x120mm triple fan radiator
Akasa fans well chosen and everything neatly integrated
Akasa intake fan is visible and the cooling hardware snakes its way inside
Spot the RAID3 disk controller from Netcell and XFX
Yum yum, more on the final SCAN 3XS Cool Chameleon in the next couple of weeks.
