Verdict: It isn't very often that a PC manages to combines good looks, low noise and good performance while offering great value for money, but the Gladiator Trident does just this. We'd have chosen a more powerful PSU, and probably opted for a quieter CPU cooler given the choice, but the Gladiator Trident is still a smart buy.
The Scan Triad, which we reviewed last month (see Issue 40, p34), is a UV-reactive fusion of noisy, powerful and very expensive components. While the Triad is the type of PC that would be a Barbarian Warrior in an MMORPG - the guy with the biggest sword and biceps that could crack walnuts - Gladiator's Trident CPC6600 would probably be a monk. It would be the kind of character that prefers to floor the opposition using strategy, finesse and maybe a bit of magic, as opposed to brute force.
The first example of Gladiator's tactical monkish thinking is the choice of CPU. Rather than choosing the faster-clocked and more expensive Intel Core 2 Duo E6700, Gladiator has instead opted for an E6600, which it has overclocked from its stock speed of 2.4GHz to 2.97GHz, faster than any Core 2 CPU sold by Intel. This overclock has been applied by raising the FSB from 266MHz to 333MHz. As the E6600 has the same 4MB of Level 2 cache as that of high-end Core 2s, you're effectively getting all of the performance of a top-end CPU for less money.
The Core 2 Duo E6600 has been paired with 2GB of OCZ PC2-7200 DDR2, which runs at its rated speed of 900MHz. Oddly, Gladiator has slackened the memory's timings from 5-5-5-15 to 6-6-6-17 though. This isn't really a problem, however, since memory bandwidth is much more important than tight memory timings in Core 2 Duo systems, as James found in our last memory Labs test (see Issue 38, p72). The two 1GB DIMMS are part of OCZ's 'Special Ops Edition' range, so they have heatspreaders decorated with jungle camouflage. After all, when you're trekking through the muddy rainforests of South America, the last thing you want is for someone to notice your RAM.
The Trident uses the same motherboard as the Triad did, the nForce 680i-equipped EVGA 122-CK-NF68-AR. However the Trident boasts a more up-to-date version of the board, as the whiny fans on the Northbridge and Southbridge have been replaced with silent, heatpipe-assisted heatsinks. As a testament to the excellent airflow of the Antec Nine Hundred chassis and its massive 200mm roof fan, the Trident's graphics card is also passively cooled. Graphics power is provided by the CPC-approved XFX GeForce 7950 GT XT (see Issue 39, p44).
The Nine Hundred case has four Antec TriCool fans, and Gladiator has set them all to their slowest rotational speed, so the system is refreshingly quiet. The source of most of the noise inside the Trident is the orange 120mm fan situated on top of the massive, chassis-filling Thermaltake Big Typhoon CPU cooler. Having said this, although you can hear the airflow rushing through the heatsink's fins, it isn't loud enough to be a major annoyance. The Trident's hard disk is the 300GB S-ATA II version of the Western Digital Caviar SE16, a quietly capacious unit that means the system's tranquillity isn't disturbed by obtrusive hard disk rattle.
The Nine Hundred has space for a PSU on the floor of the chassis, and Gladiator has opted fora 500W Tagan unit to supply the PC with juice. While this PSU is powerful enough for the system's current single 7-series GeForce graphics card and a dual-core CPU, you may want to choose a more potent PSU if you're planning to upgrade to a GeForce 8800 GTX and/or a quad-core CPU. It would also have been more prudent to use a modular PSU, as the Antec Nine Hundred can become quite cramped inside, and all the Tagan's thick wires don't help. That said, Gladiator has done its best to get around this, since the insides of the Trident are fairly neat and tidy. Still, while we're being picky, it would have been nice to see a quiet 120mm fan attached to the side panel, as the screwless fan mount on the Nine Hundred's side is ideally situated to cool both the graphics card and the Northbridge.
The Gladiator has a floppy drive and two optical drives. The DVD writer is a speedy Samsung WriteMaster that's capable of writing to DVD+/-R at 18x. The plain-looking drive below this is a Samsung 16x DVD-ROM.
PERFORMANCE
With 2GB of memory, a fast 7,200rpm SATA II hard disk and a 2.97GHz Core 2 Duo, the Trident, like its namesake, proved to be a potent weapon. The Gladiator system walked away with a 1.97 in our Paint Shop Pro test, a significantly higher score than the 1.74 that the Scan Triad managed straight out of the box. This is good going, as the Triad costs £1,800 more than the Trident and boasts the world's most expensive desktop x86 processor, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700.
Since it uses a dual-core CPU, the Trident wasn't as fast as the Triad in our fully multithreaded DVD encoding test; the Triad used its two extra cores to good effect to romp away with a score of 2.69, whereas the Trident 'only' managed 1.80. This is still rapid, and there's no denying that fully multithreaded applications such as TMPGEnc are in the minority.
The Trident already boasts a significant overclock but we tried to push it further still. The system didn't like us very much when we did this, however. We found that we could boot with the CPU running at 3.5GHz, but in order for the CPU to become stable enough to complete our benchmarks, we had to increase the voltage of the FSB and CPU to extremely high levels, and the passively cooled Northbridge chipset on the motherboard simply couldn't stand the heat. Sticking to the default voltages, the fastest speed at which the CPU would run was 3.09GHz, with an FSB speed of 344MHz (1.38GHz effective). This speeded up our test runs on average by a few seconds, so it returned only marginally higher overclocked scores.
The Trident is able to hold its own with the very best in applications, but for 3D gaming, the system is more limited. If you own a 24in or larger TFT, the native 1,920 x 1,200 resolution of your screen will be too much for the Trident's GeForce 7950 GT to handle.
However, if you own a display with a less demanding native resolution of 1,680 x 1,050 or lower then you're in for a treat. The Trident ran through our three test games with detail maxed out at 1,680 x 1,050, with anti-aliasing and high levels of anisotropic filtering enabled. Prey, F.E.A.R. and Need for Speed: Most Wanted all looked great at these settings, and the games never dropped below a smooth playable frame rate - an excellent result for a silent graphics card.
