Final thoughts, awards, and HEXUS.right2reply
Final thoughts, awards, and HEXUS Right2Reply
Scan has taken onboard the recommendations in our original review and built on the goodness of its Athlon 64 FX-62-based system. The revised model sees a couple of optical drives, Creative's excellent SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty soundcard, gargantuan storage, thanks to 1.5TBs from Seagates two SATA monsters and a super-speedy 150GB Raptor boot drive from Western Digital.For this SKU, SCAN has decided to strip out the SLI'd GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB cards present in the initial review system and replace it with the graphics card that most of you will be talking about today. According to the results obtained in our high-resolution benchmarks, the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1GB becomes the fastest single graphics card around. The extra speed is derived from two GeForce 7900-series cards in one physical package. SLI technology in one card, if you will, and the performance numbers are up to 50% higher than a single 512MB GeForce 7900 GTX's.
We fully appreciate that SCAN has included the card as a showcase of G7x power, but ultimate gaming thrills, on an NVIDIA platform, are still to be had with two discrete GeForce 7900 GTXs in SLI mode, and if you're prepared to drop over £3,000 on this base unit, another £215 for the highest-performing SLI configuration is advisable.
SCAN has built a monster of a machine with its FX-62 interpretation. As noted above, we'd pay the extra for twin GeForce 7900 GTX cards in SLI config., for ultimate gaming thrills. Other than the relatively weak warranty (3yrs, 1st year onsite, BTB for years 2&3), it's nearly perfect. However, we find it hard to give it an editor's award, and the reason is extraneous to SCAN. We took a preview look at Intel's Conroe performance and were blown away with its sheer speed. It's due to arrive in a few weeks and will, undoubtedly in our eyes, take the performance crown. Now, if SCAN can build the same kind of system around it.... we'd happily recommend it.
Overall, then, SCAN has listened to our recommendations and constructed a SKU that's the most impressive we've seen to date. Just base it around a Conroe XE and we'd buy one now!
Thoughts on this review, on the review of the Evesham FX-62 system and on AM2 and Conroe generally? You know we want to hear them over in the HEXUS.community.
HEXUS.links
HEXUS.community - discussion thread about this review
SCAN Computers - UK home page
SCAN Computers - 3XS Athlon 64 FX-62 AM2 system - Direct-buy link
Foxconn - Mainboard home page
Foxconn - nForce 590 SLI - C51XEM2AA
Foxconn - AM2 mainboard at E3 (part of the massive HEXUS.E3 show coverage)
AMD socket AM2 - Wikipedia
DDR2 SDRAM - Wikipedia
EPP - Corsair's take
NVIDIA - SLI home page
NVIDIA - 500-family core logic at CeBit 2006
CeBit 2006 - All HEXUS coverage
HEXUS.review - Evesham FX-62 AM2 system
HEXUS.review - Intel's Conroe spanks AMD FX-62's botty - for real!!
HEXUS.review - NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2
HEXUS.review - Foxconn C51XEM2AA
