Verdict: The Cepheus takes water-cooling to a new level

As long as you don't have the shakes and can read an instruction manual then you should be able to build a water-cooled PC without suffering any serious mishap. After all, most high-end water-cooling hardware manufacturers produce complete all-in-one kits. But, if you want the ultimate in water-cooling, you really need to mix and match the best components from different kits, which is something that Vadim has proved it can do expertly time and time again.

The original Cepheus was the king of Aethiopia in Greek mythology and it's also a constellation in the Northern Hemisphere, so Vadim clearly has some lofty aspirations for this PC. The Vadim Cepheus contains a mix of water-cooling components from at least three different manufacturers, including companies such as Swiftech and Danger Den, and the less well-known PolarFLO. The massive cooling loop starts with the very powerful (but quiet) Swiftech MCP655 pump, which moves the coolant through two triple 120mm-fan radiators positioned sideways at the bottom of the case.

After being cooled by these radiators, the coolant passes through the CPU and Northbridge waterblocks. The CPU waterblock is a Swiftech Apogee, while the Northbridge block is manufactured by PolarFLO. The coolant is then cooled by a single 120mm-fan radiator at the rear of the case before passing through the two Danger Den Tyee graphics cards waterblocks. Finally, the coolant spends some time sitting in the large XSPC 250mm reservoir in the centre of the case, before looping back down to the pump to be recirculated.

All the components in the cooling loop are connected via 1/2in ID piping, which is encased in anti-kink coils. The coolant inside the pipes consists of de-ionised water with Zalman ZM-G200 anti-corrosion agent added for good measure.

In addition to the seven 120mm fans mounted on the aforementioned radiators, the modded Lian Li PC-V2100 Plus chassis has a further two 80mm exhaust fans above the PSU. The PSU in question is a 700W FSP FX700-GLN model that Vadim has modded by replacing the noisy 2,400rpm fan with a much quieter 1,800rpm fan. Vadim has also attached a 40mm fan to the Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card, a 40mm fan to cool the motherboard VRMs, and mounted a 120mm fan across the motherboard to blow cool air over the RAM.

With so many fans, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the Cepheus should be extremely noisy, but it's surprisingly quiet. To keep everything under control, Vadim has mounted an mCubed T-Balancer bigNG fan controller behind the drive bays. This adjusts the speed of all the fans according to the readings taken by various temperature probes strategically positioned throughout the case. Vadim has gone one step further by programming several profiles into the T-Balancer to ensure that it gradually increases and decreases the fan speeds, rather than simply stepping between high and low speeds.

All that cooling hardware would go to waste without some monstrously overclocked hardware to cool, and in this respect, Vadim doesn't disappoint. The Cepheus has a Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU that's been overclocked from 2.93GHz to 3.6GHz by increasing its multiplier from 11 to 12 and the FSB from 266MHz (1,066MHz effective) to 300MHz (1.2GHz effective). The memory divider in the Asus P5W DH Deluxe 975X motherboard's BIOS is set to 4:5, which forces the 2GB of Patriot DDR2 memory to run at a heady 500MHz (1GHz effective) with tight 4 - 4 - 4 - 12 timings.

Data is fed into this number-crunching overclocked CPU and RAM by a pair of 150GB WD Raptor X hard drives configured in a RAID 0 array. A further 500GB of storage is provided by a Seagate hard drive. All three hard drives are mounted inside Zalman heatpipe coolers that help to conduct heat away from the drives and into the case. There are also two optical drives: a Pioneer dual-layer DVD burner and a Sony DVD/CD-RW combo drive.

The graphics cards are a pair of Sapphire Radeon X1900-series cards configured in CrossFire. As the waterblocks cover the memory modules and GPUs of both cards, Vadim has overclocked both, raising the GPUs from 650MHz to 690MHz and the RAM from 775MHz (1.55GHz effective) to 790MHz (1.58GHz effective). Originally, the cards were overclocked higher, but a bug in the Catalyst 6.6 driver caused the cards to continually lose their clock frequency settings.

The Samsung SyncMaster 244T 24in widescreen TFT is a perfect match for the Cepheus, as the two Radeon graphics cards together are capable of playing modern games at the screen's razor-sharp native resolution of 1,920 x 1,200.

Like the Quiet PC, the Vadim is bundled with an iMON system monitor, remote control and multimedia playback software. The sound card is matched with a set of Logitech Z-4500 Digital speakers, which have a slightly lower specification than the Z-5500 speakers bundled with all the other Dream PCs, but include a pair of wireless rear speakers. Vadim chose the Enermax Aurora keyboard, as it matches the colour of the Lian Li case but, personally, I didn't get along with its laptop-like unresponsive keys. In contrast, the Logitech G5 mouse is simply awesome.

PERFORMANCE

Although all four of this year's Dream PCs were fitted with 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPUs, each system performed very differently. This was largely due to the different overclock that each manufacturer applied to the CPU, but the type of RAM, motherboard, hard disks and graphics cards also made a big difference.

The Vadim doesn't have the highest CPU overclock or FSB, but its RAM runs at the highest frequency and the lowest latency timings. In addition, it's the only system to have two Raptor Xs in a RAID array. Even though the latter only provides a tiny performance benefit, it was enough to allow the Vadim to pull ahead of the Scan in the Paint Shop Pro image editing benchmark. The Scan was faster than the Vadim in the other Media Benchmarks though.

It's difficult to answer the question of which Dream PC is the best for gaming, as the answer depends on which games you play. This is because some games run better on CrossFire than on SLI, and vice versa, and some games gain no benefit from either ATi's or Nvidia's dual GPU technologies. In Oblivion, the CrossFire-equipped Vadim proved to be slightly quicker than the SLI-armed Scan, but was significantly slower in Tomb Raider: Legend, Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Prey.

CONCLUSION

The Vadim Cepheus is extremely impressive, thanks to its elaborate and carefully designed water-cooling hardware. It's also very quiet, considering the vast number of fans inside its massive customised case. This is primarily due to the excellent mCubed T-Balancer bigNG fan controller, which has been programmed by Vadim to increase the fans speed in very small steps, so you barely notice the increase in noise when the fans do rev up.

The customised case with front and side cut-outs, and combination of blue and red lighting, has also been well engineered.The Cepheus isn't the fastest Dream PC, but it's the best overall PC, and offers great performance, especially if you don't fancy the 'in-your-face' looks of the massive and much louder Scan Black Rhino.

• 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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• Asus EAH4870 TOP - Graphics cards
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro - Sound cards
• Multiwinia - Games
• Zotac GeForce GTX 260² - Graphics cards
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 - Graphics cards
• Scan 3XS X58 Core i7 - Desktop PCs