Verdict: Too heavily optimised for multi-monitor gaming to be a great all-round Dream PC.

Vadim usually names its high-end PCs after stars or constellations, and this year's Dream PC entry from the company is no exception - Xiphias is one of the many names for the Dorado constellation, aka the Swordfish. However, the theme of the Xiphias isn't that of a big carnivorous fish with an enormous spiked bill; instead it caters to the flight simulator market.

Visually, the pilot painted on the left side of the case and the jet fighter, complete with blazing afterburners, on the right side are the most distinctive elements of the Xiphias. There are also several stars painted on the front door and drive bay bezels. However, it's important to note that this is just an example of what Vadim can do - if you don't like the aviation theme, simply ask Vadim to paint your Xiphias in a different way.

The Xiphias is built inside the same Lian Li PC-V2100B Plus case that housed Vadim's winning entry of last year's Dream PC Labs test. However, Vadim has extensively modded the case by filling in and smoothing away the ugly grooves from the front door. In addition, the lower chamber has been totally gutted to make room for two enormous custom-built quad 120mm-fan radiators, while four 120mm fan blowholes have been cut in the roof. In addition to the two massive radiators in the lower chamber, a dual 120mm-fan radiator is fitted to the roof; in total, the Xiphias's water-cooling loop is cooled by ten 120mm fans. Despite the huge number of fans, the Xiphias is very quiet, thanks to the use of a mCubed T-Balancer bigNG fan controller that adjusts the speed of the fans according to the temperature. However, despite the massive 1/2in ID tubing and enormous radiators, as the CPU shares the same coolant as the graphics cards, it runs hotter than the CPU in the Scan, maxing out at 79ûC.

The CPU in question is the awesome 3GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6850, which Vadim has overclocked to 3.74GHz by raising the FSB from 333MHz (1,333MHz effective) to 415MHz (1,660MHz effective). This is a pretty massive overclock, and only a few megahertz shy of the CPU in the Scan, which is overclocked to 3.75GHz. Nonetheless, the CPU has much more memory bandwidth to play with in the Xiphias, thanks to the use of the Intel P35 chipset-based Asus Blitz Extreme motherboard. Not only is this chipset faster than the nForce 680i SLI used in the Scan, but it also supports DDR3 memory. In the Xiphias, this takes the form of four 1GB Super Talent DIMMs set to run at 1,660MHz at 7-6-6-16 latency timings.

Although the P35 chipset doesn't support SLI, the Xiphias has two Nvidia graphics cards. However, the motherboard supports CrossFire, so if ATI brings out a worthy DirectX 10 GPU in the future, this could provide a good upgrade path. The Xiphias has two graphics cards, so that games such as Flight Simulator X, which can take advantage of two GPUs, can drive two monitors at once. This isn't as good as it sounds, however; even with two separate cards, Flight Simulator X still ran at an appallingly low frame rate on the Xiphias, averaging just 6fps with the two monitors displaying different views. The other games that support multiple monitors, such as Supreme Commander and EVE Online, don't support two separate graphics cards, so you have to reboot and re-attach the second monitor to the second output on the primary graphics card. When this happens, the second graphics card is left idle, soaking up power for no benefit.

As the graphics cards in question are BFG GeForce 8800 Ultra cards, they aren't exactly cheap. However, the primary graphics card does a good job in non-multimonitor games thanks to its massive overclock - the GPU is set to run at a stunning 700MHz, and the RAM zooms along at 1.15GHz (2.3GHz effective). This unparalleled GPU overclock is made possible by the Blastflow Siberian waterblocks; Vadim claims that these cool the GPU and RAM to more than 10ûC lower than other waterblocks. The primary graphics card outputs its signal to a luscious 1,920 x 1,200 27in Samsung 275T monitor, while the secondary graphics card outputs to a 1,680 x 1,050 22in Samsung 226BW monitor. Of course, the Xiphias could be supplied with two large monitors, but at a far greater cost.

Unlike those in the other Dream PCs the storage sub-system in the Xiphias is pretty special too - it's the first production PC we've seen to use SSDs instead of hard disks. Inside are four 32GB Samsung Flash SSDs configured in a RAID 0 array, which is much faster than any hard disk array. As the total capacity of the RAID 0 array is only 128GB, the Xiphias also includes a 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 hard disk for storing your other data. Also included is an LG Blu-ray writer and an 80GB external USB 2 hard disk, which is used to restore the operating systems should Windows die. Along for the ride is a very responsive Steel Series Steelkeys 6G keyboard, Logitech G5 mouse, Terratec digital TV tuner, Abit wireless LAN card, Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro and 7.1 Creative GigaWorks S750 speakers. All of these components are powered by a 1kW Cooler Master Real Power M1000 PSU. As a lot of software doesn't work fully in Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, the Xiphias is also supplied with Windows XP Home 32-bit, allowing you to choose which OS to load each time the system boots.

Performance

The Xiphias proved to be incredibly quick in our Media Benchmarks 2007. The P35 chipset and DDR3 memory enabled it to speed past the higher-overclocked Scan in the CPU-intensive video encoding test, with a score of 2,262 - more than double that of our reference PC, which is based around a Core 2 Duo E6750. Meanwhile, the four SSDs in RAID 0 allowed the Vadim to blaze past the other Dream PCs in the multitasking test, achieving a ludicrously fast score of 1,460. These are incredible scores, although the testing had to be carried out in Windows XP, not Vista 64-bit, as the Gimp test wouldn't run stably, and Windows XP runs slightly faster than Vista. Even so, there's no denying the Xiphias' performance in multimedia and I/O-intensive applications.

As the Xiphias was the only non-SLI Dream PC submitted this year, it was easily outperformed by the other systems in many games, such as F.E.A.R. and Flight Simulator X - hardly a resounding endorsement for a PC so obviously designed to run this game. However, as the GPU of the primary graphics card is so heavily overclocked, and many games receive little or no benefit from SLI, the Xiphias was faster than the Dell and Gladiator PCs in many games, including Supreme Commander, Oblivion and World in Conflict. Clearly, even a single GeForce 8800 Ultra is capable of playing most games smoothly at 1,920 x 1,200.

Conclusion

While the Xiphias is very quiet, and boasts incredible performance, it suffers from being too heavily optimised for multimonitor gaming. In fact, in many ways, the Scan White Cobra is more suited to multi-monitor gaming, since you could simply temporarily disable SLI and connect a second monitor to the secondary graphics card. You'd then have a PC with SLI graphics and multi-monitor support (though not at the same time). In contrast, the second graphics card in the Xiphias spends most of its time soaking up electricity without speeding up games. The White Cobra also looks more distinctive than the Xiphias, and is cheaper too, costing nearly £3,500 less.

• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008
• Hard disks - 20th March 2008
• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008

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