Verdict: All the excitement, cost and noise of the new-generation hardware
The component list of the Scan 3XS Triad reads like the excited demands of a child telling Santa what he wants for Christmas, ignoring the fact that the real Father Christmas lives at the North Pole, not in a grotto at their local Woolworths. The Scan 3XS Triad is what happens when you take the most expensive and desirable PC components in the world and shove them into a silver case, with a high-end water-cooling kit and UV lights thrown in for good measure.
The Triad's large chassis is the SilverStone Temjin TJ09S. This is the first time we've seen this case, and it sports some innovative features. The two hard disk enclosures can accommodate up to six drives and are rotated for easy access. Rotated hard drive bays tend to block off the front intake fan in most cases, but SilverStone has avoided this problem by cutting a substantial cavity into the main motherboard enclosure of the TJ09S, with large vents that allow a single 120mm fan to suck cool air directly into it. At the front, the hard disk enclosure is effectively separated from the rest of the case, with its own 120mm fan providing cooling for the rapid 150GB Western Digital Raptor X and the voluminous 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 disks.
The sophisticated case ventilation is reassuring, as the Triad doubles as an electric heater. A dauntingly powerful 1kW Enermax Galaxy power supply sits on the floor of the case. This large modular PSU generates a significant amount of heat on its own but, to compound matters, it's accompanied by an XFX GeForce 8800 GTX, the fastest graphics card ever made, and one of the hottest too. Scan has turned to Corsair for memory, and the Triad boasts 2GB of XMS2 Dominator PC2-8500 DDR2 RAM. As everything in the Triad is slightly OTT anyway, this is one of the first systems in which the large esoteric heatsinks on the Dominator memory haven't looked out of place.
To keep costs down, Scan has opted for a relatively cheap and cheerful CPU ... just kidding. The Triad's CPU is a £700 quad-core Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700, which has four cores clocked at Intel's reference speed of 2.66GHz. This CPU is installed in an EVGA N680 motherboard, which is one of the first boards to be based on the brand-new nForce 680i SLI chipset (you can read about the 680a chipset for AMD CPUs on p11). Nvidia claims that this chipset is 'The Definitive Gaming Platform' and has been designed 'for performance and extreme overclocking'. The features list is certainly tasty and includes everything that the nForce 5-series offers, such as FirstPacket, DualNet and SLI memory, plus a new memory controller that includes a pre-processor to reduce latency. It also natively supports DDR2 memory speeds of up to 1.2GHz.
With all the toasty components inside the Triad, Scan has sensibly chosen to water-cool the CPU, and it's hidden under an Alphacool NexXxos waterblock. Thin, low-flow-rate tubing snakes out of the CPU cooler and into two 120mm radiators attached to the large vents in the roof of the case. The green, UV-reactive coolant inside the tubing is kept moving by a very nice-looking Alphacool pump.
Our main gripe with this setup is the noise. As well as not having any foam or rubber pads to prevent the pump's vibrations from transferring to the case, the pump is clearly too powerful for the system. The gurgling torrent inside the reservoir, which is installed in the uppermost 3.5in drive bay, is quite distracting. The upside of this is that the swirling whirlpools that form inside the transparent reservoir are great fun to watch, but a £3,000 PC shouldn't sound like a tropical fish tank.
All five case fans inside the Triad are 120mm Sharkoon 2000 models, which are faster-spinning versions of the 120mm Sharkoon Silent Eagle 1000 fan that won our first case fan Labs test. They provide more airflow than the 1000s, but are slightly noisier as a result. Thankfully, four of the fans are attached to an Akasa fan controller, which sits below the silver DVD writer on the front panel. This allows you to adjust fan speeds depending on whether you want low noise levels or optimum cooling.
As well as being the name of the Chinese mafia, a triad is also a musical chord made up of three sounds of different frequencies. Ironically, this is an accurate way of describing the racket generated by the Scan 3XS Triad. You expect a low, pleasant hum from a water-cooling kit and speed-controlled case fans, but the acoustics are ruined by a grating fan on the motherboard's Northbridge. The noise is made worse by a third, higher-pitched whine courtesy of a tiny Southbridge fan. When the system is under load, excess heat literally pours out of the exhaust vents of the case, which suggests that this active cooling of the motherboard's chipsets is indeed necessary.
However, a dual-radiator water-cooling kit should be able to quietly and effectively cool your entire system, so it's disappointing that even though the Triad incorporates a quality water-cooling kit, you still have to put up with a couple of small whiny fans.
As if you needed anything more to show off at a LAN party, Scan has placed the Triad's audio in the more than capable hands of the Fatal1ty FPS version of the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi. As well as built-in X-RAM, which, in compatible games such as Battlefied 2 and Prey, can store high-quality audio data, the card also has a Fatal1ty-branded control panel on the front of the case, which includes lots of handy I/O ports such as coaxial and optical S/PDIF outputs. Unfortunately, this panel is black, which jars with the silver case, DVD-RW and fan controller.
PERFORMANCE
Somehow we doubt whether a bit of noise is going to prevent anyone from drooling over this system. Sitting down with a water-cooled, quad-core CPU backed up by premium overclocking equipment is the stuff that overclocking dreams are made of. The fact that Scan hasn't overclocked a processor that's clearly intended for this very task is a little strange, but we all know that it's more fun to do it yourself anyway.
At stock speeds, the Triad was very quick. When an image editing score of 1.74 is the least impressive result, you know you have a fast PC on your hands. With a score of 2.69, the Triad ate through our DVD encoding test at more than twice the speed of a 2.8GHz Pentium D 820, although its multitasking score was 'only' double the speed of our reference chip.
When it came to overclocking, we first ascertained the maximum FSB that the nForce 680i Northbridge could handle. The PC refused to boot at anything above 360MHz (1.44GHz effective), which, considering the QX6700's out-of-the-box multiplier of 10x, would theoretically allow for a maximum CPU speed of 3.6GHz. However, even when we raised the CPU voltage to a hefty 1.5V, we couldn't get the system to remain stable at this speed. In the end, we had to settle for an FSB of 340MHz (1.36GHz effective), and therefore a CPU speed of 3.4GHz, which wasn't quite as high as we were hoping for.
Nevertheless, this overclock really boosted performance. Image editing rose to 2.17, DVD encoding absolutely ripped along with a score of 3.26, and the Triad flew through our multitasking test with a score of 2.41. The Triad's overall score when overclocked was a smile-inducing 2.61.
However, while this overall score is pretty fantastic, we've seen higher scores from overclocked, dual-core Core 2 Extreme X6800 systems, which shows that, at the moment, a CPU's clock speed can be more important than how many cores it has.
Needless to say, our graphics benchmarks didn't pose too much of a problem for the XFX GeForce 8800 GTX, and the minimum frame rate of 34fps in F.E.A.R. at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4 x AA and 16 x AF was the only time we were less than totally confident in the Triad's gaming abilities. It's a shame we can't test the card with any DirectX 10 games but, in terms of brute power in DirectX 9 games, the Triad is as menacing as its underworld namesakes.
CONCLUSION
The Triad is the perfect example of why stuffing a case chock full of premium hardware doesn't make a dream PC. The noise of the Triad is unacceptable, as a high-end water-cooling kit should be up to the task of cooling the entire system. We'll let Scan off for the graphics card, because water-cooling manufacturers haven't had time to design waterblocks for 8-series GeForce cards yet, but other decisions are less forgivable. For example, the black X-Fi front panel jars the eye, and we can't understand why Scan has gone to the trouble of adding UV-reactive dye to the coolant, wrapping all the tubes and wires in Swiftech Coolsleeves and fitting two UV cold-cathode tubes inside the case, when the case lacks a side-panel window through which you can view it all.
If you need to ask how much the Triad costs then you can't afford it. However, if you have a credit card that's itching to be abused, and you want to own the sort of computing power that was previously only available from supercomputers right this minute, then the Triad won't disappoint. It's ludicrously fast.
Otherwise, however, we advise playing the waiting game for a couple of months until there are more options available from which to choose.
