Verdict: Water-cooled, but not great value for money
As Sherlock Holmes discovered in 'The Hound of The Baskervilles', if you want to turn a boring dog into a murderous, phantom hound, you just have to make it glow. It's common knowledge that making things glow is a sure way of making them more exciting. Having a UV-reactive dog would be cool - even a fluorescent hamster would be cool - but there are strict laws against modding your pets.
Fortunately, these laws don't apply to PC hardware. Scan's new 3XS OC-GTS, with its large rectangular side window, four ultraviolet cold-cathode lights, neon wiring and blue water-cooling tubes, is unlikely to blend in with your room's décor unless you live in the film 'Tron'. However, it's impossible to peer into the toxic, sci-fi glow of the case without experiencing a sense of wonder.
The water-cooling kit is the centrepiece. A 12V Eheim pump, totally submerged in a transparent, 3XS-branded Alphacool reservoir, provides the flow. This compact setup has the advantage of partially dampening the noise from the pump. Two thick, acrylic water-cooling tubes containing the coolant, to which Scan has added UV-reactive colouring, snake from the pump. You can choose your preferred coolant colour when speccing your system, although we agree with Scan's choice of blue in this instance, as it gels well with the black aluminium SilverStone case.
Disappointingly, the kit is set up to cool only one component, the CPU, which is hidden under an attractive Aqua Computer Cuplex XT waterblock. Heat is then drained from the coolant by a large Aqua Computer XT240 radiator, and its two slow-spinning 120mm fans. Ideally situated against a large roof vent, this system has the potential to cool a lot more than a single CPU.
The hulking black case is a SilverStone TJ05 Temjin, which will be familiar to long-term readers, as the original case received a Premium Grade Approved award. However, we've seen better cases from SilverStone, Cooler Master and Lian Li since then. Despite its age, though, the two 120mm fans and strong aluminium construction suggest there's life in the TJ05 yet - and the addition of extra venting in the roof of the chassis to provide space for the radiator is a wise move on Scan's part.
The components inside the OC-GTS are very much mid-range. The CPU, a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, is a decent choice if you're looking for value for money. It offers the same 4MB of Level 2 cache as the top-of-the-range E6700, but costs £50 less, as it gives up 266MHz in speed. Of course, if you're looking to save money on a mid-range CPU then there's little point in cancelling out this saving by buying a top-spec motherboard. With this in mind, the budget-friendly yet sprightly nForce 650i-based Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI is a good match for the CPU. Scan has pre-overclocked the E6600 to 3GHz, so it should be a serious contender in our benchmarks, and proves once again what we found with our review Abit board - it's a sterling overclocker.
There's no doubt that the system is aimed at gaming, so you'd expect that if Scan were to venture into high-end territory with any of the components, it would be the graphics card. Scan has opted for the cheapest of Nvidia's high-end GeForce 8800 cards, the 320MB GTS, which is an air-cooled, standard-clocked model from XFX. It provides enough power to run modern games at 1,680 x 1,050, and supports DirectX 10 graphics effects.
Two of the board's four DIMM slots are inhabited by two 1GB sticks of quality Corsair XMS PC2-6400 memory, which has been overclocked from 800MHz to 888MHz (effective). This is plenty of memory and will get the most from the bundled Windows Vista Home Premium OS. The hard disk is the dependable 500GB Samsung SpinPoint, and the optical drive is a LightScribe-compatible Samsung WriteMaster DVD-RW. Sound is handled by the motherboard, and Scan offers a one-year on-site warranty, with a further two years of return-to-base cover.
Performance
Now that Intel has pushed its quad-core CPUs close to 3GHz with the new Core 2 Extreme QX6800, a 3GHz dual-core Core 2 won't set our Media Benchmarks alight. It's still nothing to dismiss though - this time last year, a 3GHz Core 2 Duo would have cost £775. Not surprisingly, the OC-GTS returned respectable results. Its score of 1.86 in the Paint Shop Pro image editing test is faster than we'd expect from an E6700 in a premium motherboard, and an overall score of 1.94 means that this system offers high-end levels of 2D performance out of the box. As it's only a dual-core machine, the OC-GTS gets stomped by the similarly priced quad-core Chillblast in the DVD encoding test, scoring 1.79 compared to the Chillblast's 2.88. In fact, the OC-GTS was slower than the Chillblast in all three tests. Clearly, the OC-GTS's 200MHz faster CPU doesn't make up for the fact that it has half as many cores.
Overclocking beyond the 3GHz that Scan offers was predictably ineffectual - we only squeezed an extra 37MHz out of the E6600, taking its speed up to 3.04GHz. The last time we overclocked an E6600, in the excellent air-cooled Gladiator Trident CPC6600, we managed to hit a similar speed of 3.09GHz, so clearly, this is the chip's natural limit.
During testing, the passive heatsink cooling the Northbridge chip on the Abit board became ludicrously hot. A digital thermometer revealed that, when under load, the Northbridge heatsink ran at a toasty 87ûC, and we wouldn't be surprised if this was preventing further overclocking. It suggests that the case's two 120mm fans weren't shifting enough air, and we certainly couldn't feel much airflow. Add the rotated hard disk caddy that blocks air intake, and it isn't surprising that the Northbridge became warm. In contrast, the water-cooled CPU never ran above 45-C according to CoreTemp, even when running our stressful DVD encoding test.
For gaming, it's hard to complain about a 3GHz dual-core CPU and a GeForce 8800 GTS, and the Scan had no problem powering along a variety of titles at 1,680 x 1,050. In our Need for Speed: Carbon test at 1,280 x 1,024, the OC-GTS scored 44fps on average. In gaming, more cores have yet to result in increased performance, so the OC-GTS doesn't suffer in comparison to the quad-core Chillblast.
Conclusion
The water-cooling system inside the 3XS OC-GTS is excellent; it looks good and keeps the temperature of the overclocked dual-core CPU at low levels even when running intensive tasks. However, it's a waste that only the CPU is water-cooled, especially as the Northbridge runs so hot. The Chillblast has better specs, with an X-Fi, 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS and quad-core CPU, so naturally it outperforms the OC-GTS. However, the Scan's bigger case and capable water-cooling system make it a better bet for future upgrades.
