Scan 3XS i3 OC SMART Edition GTX 460 system review. Featuring GeForce GTX 460

Final thoughts and rating

Set to a budget of just above £700 for a base unit, thereby putting in the reach of most readers, Scan's 3XS i3 OC SMART Edition GTX 460 system combines the latest mid-range components in an eminently sensible fashion.

Intel's Core i3 530 chip, ratcheted to 4GHz, provides plenty of oomph for everyday applications and helps get the best out of the well-overclocked GeForce GTX 460 768MB graphics card. Integration is solid and, as a consequence of well-thought-out components, performance is very good across a range of benchmarks, easily beating the numbers posted by our two-year-old comparison system.

There's little to criticise here, given the price point, but we'd shell out the extra pennies for the USB 3.0- and SATA 6Gbps-totin' version of the motherboard. Better still, understanding how well the graphics card scales when a second is added, we'd look for an SLI-compatible board.

But we're nitpicking, really. £716 won't buy you an Intel Core i7 970X chip, but that for that same outlay you get a system that should last you a good while. Recommended if you want a no-fuss, tidy build from folk who know what they're doing.

The Good

Tidy build, sensible components for a £700 build
Heavily overclocked CPU and GPU: yum
Solid performance in all tests
Quiet under load

The Not So Good

A victim of its own quietness, the mechanical hard-drive's seeking gets annoying

HEXUS Rating

Scan 3XS i3 OC SMART Edition GTX 460

HEXUS Awards

Scan 3XS i3 OC SMART Edition GTX 460

HEXUS Where2Buy

The 3XS i3 OC SMART Edition GTX 460 PC can be purchased from Scan and configured in a number of ways:

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No word on temperatures ?

Terbinator
No word on temperatures ?

We have all the data logged, naturally, and if you think it's important to have temperatures for systems in forthcoming reviews we'll be happy to include them.

Scan 3XS

CPU idle temperature - 33°C
CPU load temperature - 74°C. (Prime95 on all cores)
GPU idle temperature - 33°C
GPU load temperature - 72°C (FurMark, 53 per cent fan speed)

Slightly unfair comparison I feel as the new chip is overclocked to 4ghz and the other one is at stock - been nice to see it going against say an overclocked Q6600 ….

Can the CPU cooler be oriented the opposite way in this system as surely that makes more sense? I have a arctic cooling freezer 64 pro that looks very similar to the cooler used and that can be mounted to exhaust out of the case (aided by a 120mm fan) instead of blowing over the ram. I guess you could reverse the fan directions though after a while the air at the back would probably be too hot to use as intake.

Thanks for the review, that was interesting, looks like a cool system.

This is not a criticism of the review, but for me and (I would imagine) a good many Hexites, a comparison against a Q6600 system would be very welcomed - lots of us are still hanging on to ours and would love to see a reason to upgrade.
Cheers!