Scan 3XS Cyclone SLI

Review: Scan 3XS Cyclone SLI

by Parm Mann on 20 September 2011, 15:00 4.0

Tags: SCAN

Final thoughts and rating

Give an enthusiast PC builder £3,000 to play with, and there's a good chance they'd come up with a system not too dissimilar to Scan's 3XS Cyclone SLI.

The gaming machine is packed full of some of the very best components available, and the hardware - which includes Intel's best Sandy Bridge processor, two of NVIDIA's fastest single-GPU graphics cards, and a pair of Corsair's quickest SSDs - delivers blistering overall performance.

It's wish-list material alright, but it arrives in the shadow of soon-to-be-released Sandy Bridge Extreme - an upcoming Intel platform that will become the go-to choice for enthusiast users. Wait a few months, and we reckon the 3XS Cyclone SLI will be available in Sandy Bridge Extreme flavours.

Looming upgrades are always a concern, but there's also a small matter of cost. Experienced builders will argue that it's cheaper and more rewarding to buy the components and build the PC yourself, but in our estimation Scan's award-winning service, top-notch build quality, two-year warranty and extreme overclocks are worth the additional outlay and added piece of mind.

We'd like to see an option for a liquid-cooled CPU, and a bit of sound-proofing wouldn't go amiss, but let's face it; few recipients of this dream machine are going to be left disappointed.

Bottom line: Scan's 3XS Cyclone SLI is one of the best-looking and best-performing gaming rigs that £3,000 can buy.

The Good

Looks great
Outstanding performance
Heavily overclocked CPU and GPUs
Water-cooled graphics cards
Great build quality
Blazing-fast SSD storage
Very little bloatware

The Bad

Power hungry under load
No liquid-cooled CPU option
A bit noisier than we'd like

HEXUS Rating

Scan 3XS Cyclone SLI

HEXUS Awards

Scan 3XS Cyclone SLI

HEXUS Where2Buy

The Scan 3XS Cyclone SLI PC is available to purchase from 3xs.scan.co.uk.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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normally i'd say great review and nice looking PC. However today i cant. I dont understand the choice of comparison pc's none of them are anything like the scan one. A like for like spec competitor system would have been nice. £1850 being the most expensive you should stick another 580 in that one and run it again as that would be a £2200ish system and probably be pretty close for performance

but it's a shame Scan doesn't provide the option to liquid-cool the CPU.

I suggested this configuration back when the GTX 480 came out and scan originally had a water cooled CPU but aircooled 480s. The GPUs will pump out more heat than the CPU, and the high volume space (and airflow directions) available for CPU cooling means it's much better suited to air cooling, and can assist general system/moetherboard cooling, while the GPUs are better under water.

liquid cooling CPUs is so unnecessary as air coolers perform equally as well (give or take a few degrees) without having to install radiators, piping etc.

great rig great setup, love these high end boutique things but there is 1 massive problem with this - 1.5gb frame buffer is no way near enough for a rig of this power.

whoever buys this is going to marry it to (at least 1) 2560x1600 monitor (if you don't you're just a tit frankly) and will expect to be able to ramp up the AA, and at those resolutions 1.5gb is just not enough, especially since anyone buying this will not be expecting to have to upgrade for 3 years at least

I'm disappointed by the lack of a water based CPU cooling option as this means a “noisy” pair of fans on the CPU. Overkill maybe, but for 3k, surely you want the very best as opposed to nearly the best.

Otherwise, this looks like an extremely attractive PC, with a heck of a price tag. Certainly not value for money, but top end rigs rarely are.

When are they going to replace their Jellyfish model? That's quite old hat now - I'm hoping that refresh is linked with the new Socket 2011 release…

Hi Tatty,

Thanks for your feedback, adding the CPU into the waterloop means that the graphics cards would dump heat onto the CPU. The solution to this would be to have a dual loop system as in our 3XS White Tiger, however adding another loop into this chassis would increase the cost considerably not to mention this chassis doesn’t lend itself very well to dual loops.

Another point to consider is even with a watercooled sandy bridge CPU you won’t actually get much more performance from it, 4.7Ghz is about the limit you can push a 2600k without compromising on stability (this system passed 24hours+ running prime 95 and furmark).

Cheers