Review: Scan 3XS Z77 Node Titan

Final Thoughts and Rating

Extreme PC gaming aficionados with a love for all things SFF need look no further - the Node Titan really is small-but-explosive - but there are a few caveats worth bearing in mind.

First and foremost, there's the cost of the GeForce GTX Titan graphics card. While the top-notch engineering of Nvidia's fastest single-GPU solution makes Titan an ideal fit for compact machines, its premium price tag pushes the cost of the Scan's system up past £2,000.

That's a lot of money for a base unit, and if you're willing to part with that amount of cash, you expect excellence in every aspect. Scan's rig almost delivers - performance is staggering and the system's diminutive size is certain to impress - yet there are a couple of minor question marks, including a lack of optical drive and higher-than-expected noise levels under load.

However, the Scan 3XS Z77 Node Titan is one of the most striking small-form-factor systems we've ever seen. By integrating an overclocked Core i7-3770K processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan graphics card, this little box of tricks delivers a level of performance that rarely fails to impress.

The Good

Staggering small-form-factor performance
Top-of-the-range CPU overclocked to 4.6GHz
Ultimate single-GPU graphics card
Well put together

The Bad

No optical drive
Can get noisy under load

HEXUS Rating

Scan 3XS Z77 Node Titan

HEXUS Awards

Scan 3XS Z77 Node Titan

HEXUS Where2Buy

The 3XS Z77 Node Titan gaming PC is available to purchase from Scan Computers.

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.

[18/03/2013] James Gorbold, Technical Marketing, Scan Computers

The review does raise some interesting points about thermals and acoustics, which we thought HEXUS readers would like to know a little more about. Whenever the 3XS team at Scan specs up a system for review we have to make certain judgements about what each reviewer would like to see. In the case of the 3XS Z77 Node Titan we decided to overclock the CPU to 4.6GHz and the GPU from 837MHz to 1GHz, the biggest overclocks that we supply under warranty.

However, the extent of both the CPU and GPU overclock are configurable by the customer at the point of purchase. In the 3XS configurator for the 3XS Z77 Node Titan for example customers can choose no overclock, 4.4GHz or 4.6GHz. The configurator even states that at 4.6GHz that ‘Performance is prioritised over acoustics’ while at 4.4GHz the system has ‘balanced thermal and acoustic characteristics’. The same sort of choices can also be made for the graphics card.

Therefore it is possible to buy a quieter 3XS Z77 Node Titan from Scan – it’s just that for the purposes of this review we decided to prioritise performance as Titan is a flagship GPU and deserves to be shown off in a spectacular (albeit small in and stylish case) way.