Verdict: Very fast, but it's poor value for money and too noisy

Last year, the SavRow Deuterium walked away with the Dream PC 2004 award, and as such, SavRow is this year's defending champion. So how does this new Deuterium system compare with the original?

From the outside, the Deuterium appears to have hardly changed, as it's still housed inside the same YCC 6XF1 midi-tower chassis. This isn't the tallest of cases, but it's incredibly wide and deep, making it ideal for housing a water-cooled PC. In contrast to last year's Deuterium, which was painted gloss black, this year's entry is sprayed with a chromatic paint that changes between purple, red and dark blue, depending on the ambient light. The paint certainly helps to disguise how boxy the 6XF1 looks from the front. The case only has two USB 2 ports, which is rather disappointing, when many of the other Dream PCs have more USB 2 ports, FireWire ports and even memory card readers.

Inside the case, almost everything is new, from the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI motherboard to the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU and 1GB of Corsair XMS3200XL Pro memory. The CPU is pre-overclocked from its default 2.4GHz to 2.6GHz, which is achieved by raising the FSB from 200MHz to 217MHz. This in turn boosts the memory frequency to 434MHz. Also installed in the motherboard are two GeForce 6800 Ultra cards, although, rather disappointingly, they aren't pre-overclocked, and run at the default frequency settings of 425MHz/1.1GHz.

Although the CPU and GPU cooling system, collectively known as the HeatSeeker X2, looks exactly the same as the HeatSeeker in the original Deuterium, it has been substantially upgraded. There are still two separate radiators, each cooled by a 92mm fan, but the eight TECs have been significantly upgraded, and draw a combined 190W from the 12V rail, up from 130W. This enables the HeatSeeker X2 to shift considerably more heat out of the case than the HeatSeeker. However, it has a big downside; because the new TECs are so power-hungry, SavRow has been forced to use a monstrous PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 850 SSI PSU. Although this has a total output of 850W and four 12V rails, each rated at 17A, it's very noisy, emitting a deeply unpleasant whooshing noise that any washing machine would be proud of. Unfortunately, the motherboard chipset isn't water cooled, but as you can't hear the 40mm chipset fan above the noise from the PSU, this is a moot point.

Rather than opting for a fancy third-party RAID controller, the Deuterium's three 250GB Hitachi Deskstar hard disks are configured together in one giant RAID 0 array. This essentially provides you with one massive 750GB drive, which sounds great, but leaves your data incredibly vulnerable if one drive goes down. A more practical arrangement would be two drives in RAID 0 and a single drive on its own. The hard drives are cooled by a 120mm intake fan at the front of the case.

The other components inside the Deuterium are a Plextor PX-716A dual-layer DVD writer and Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS sound card. The GA-K8NXP-SLI is bundled with an 802.11g wireless LAN NIC, and this sits in a PCI slot on the motherboard. There's also a set of 7.1 Creative Gigaworks S750 speakers that provide very good sound quality. The keyboard is a Saitek Gamers and the mouse is a Logitech MX1000, both painted in the same chromatic paint as the case. SavRow also includes Half-Life 2 Collectors Edition in the box.

The monitor is a tasty treat - a gorgeous ViewSonic VP231wb 23in widescreen TFT. With a native resolution of 1,900 x 1,200, this panel can display several windows at the same time without any compromise. Thanks to its 16ms response time, it can also zoom through games and movies without any ghosting.

PERFORMANCE

With a dual-core CPU running at just a smidgen over 2.6GHz (2,604MHz to be precise), the Deuterium is no slouch and sped through our Media Benchmarks at a terrific pace. Unsurprisingly, its fantastic Plextor PX-716A optical drive gave it a real edge, and it zoomed past the competition in the CD ripping test with a score of 1.83. The CD was practically smouldering when we ejected it from the drive. The video encoding test was very quick too, although the Deuterium was slightly slower than the Alienware and Armari systems, both of which have slightly faster overclocked CPUs.

In Far Cry, the Deuterium's performance was less spectacular, achieving an average frame rate of 65.8fps at 1,600 x 1,200 with 4x AA and 8x AF, and dropping to 27.9fps with HDR enabled. The reason for the below-par gaming performance is the pair of non-overclocked graphics cards, a major disappointment, considering the £5,581.60 price tag.

CONCLUSION

SavRow is the defending champion from last year's Dream PC Labs test, but unfortunately the Deuterium hasn't moved quickly enough with the times to be worthy of a second award. It can now support a dual-core CPU and twin graphics cards in SLI, but even so, the upgraded HeatSeeker 2 cooling system is pushed to the limit. The Deuterium passed our overnight folding stress test with flying colours, but it gets very hot, while the noisy PSU means that you won't want to sit in front of it for too long without headphones.

SavRow has another Dream PC project in the works, but it wasn't ready for this year's Labs test, so it was left to this retrofitted Deuterium to carry the flag. But, unfortunately for SavRow, after a year on top, the Deuterium is showing its age and can't compete on a level footing with the front runners in this year's Dream PCs Labs test.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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