Discussion I
Like many of the Scan 3XS systems we've looked at in the past, the 3XS X58 Core i7 is housed in a Silverstone chassis - in this instance one of the more recent designs, the Fortress FT01B-W.
Scan has chosen to supply the windowed version of the chassis, and despite its high-quality implementation, the window does little to add to the aesthetics. Unlike many other high-end systems, there's simply not a great deal of interior eye-candy to gawp at.
The cabling inside is generally very tidy and nothing obstructs access to the mainboard. It would have been nice, however, for Scan to make sure that cables were pre-fitted to allow for easy installation of an additional optical drive - a Blu-ray unit, for example.
The large heatsink and fan attached to the overclocked Intel Core i7 920 processor comes in the form of the Thermalright eXtreme 120 - a solution that should, we feel, be more than man enough for the TDP rating of the CPU. Nonetheless, we found that under load the CPU's core temperature rose to a toasty 76 degrees Celsius, and that's when our test lab's ambient temperature sat at around 25 degrees Celsius.
Not quite the cooling performance we'd expect, perhaps the LGA1366 bolt-thru-kit isn't ensuring a uniform clip-pressure? It is, after all, a cooler originally designed for LGA775 processors. Despite the unexpected high temperatures, no clock-throttling or instability was observed during our testing.
Scan's platform of choice for this review system is the feature-packed ASUS P6T Deluxe. One of the board's best features, in our estimation, is the on-board Express Gate SSD that contains a fully-featured web-browser, in addition to Messenger and Skype clients powered by the self-contained Splashtop Linux micro-kernel.
Although ASUS claims the time taken to get online can be as quick as five seconds, we found it actually takes around 10-15 seconds. Admittedly, that's still somewhat faster than booting into Windows XP or Windows Vista. For some unknown reason, Scan opted to leave Splashtop functionality disabled in the BIOS by default, perhaps feeling it's better suited to a notebook - and it may have a point.
Installed in three of the six available DIMM sockets is 3GB of Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1333. Of course, at this price point, we'd have preferred the system to be kitted with 6GB. On the other hand, we didn't encounter any serious stuttering during our game testing and it's therefore unlikely that the additional £80 outlay would be beneficial to most users.
Due to the CPU overclock, the modules run at 10-10-10-24 timings at 1,463MHz, up from the stock 9-9-9-24 and 1,333MHz. In order to keep things nice and stable, Scan has tweaked the voltage to the modules to 1.64V. Considering the same heat-spreaders are also used on Corsair's higher-voltage DDR2 range, this shouldn't be an issue.
