We are steadily seeing more and more machines coming straight from the retailers that are overclocked to the hilt.

Originally, the overclocker was someone either who wanted to get their machine to go as fast as possible before going into melt down, or was desperate to eke out some extra performance from older parts.

What we're seeing now is that it has filtered through into the mainstream. Companies such as Dell are offering top-spec machines running above their standard settings with all the overclocking headaches taken away.

High Speed Computers is almost a mixture of the old and the new kind of overclockers. It's a small company specialising in getting as much out of its hardware as possible, but it's also trying to take the best parts and make them over-perform.

What's different compared to Dell's approach is that each machine is hand-built and burned-in for 24 hours before it's shipped. There are other firms that do this: Cyberpower, for example, offers a 72 hour burn-in for all systems.

Stress test

What HCS does, though, is to stress-test all its overclocked machines in a dedicated heat chamber, subjecting these PCs to temperatures that no human, let alone PC, should be able to operate in.

You can then be sure that the ramped-up chip in your expensive system isn't going to end up as so much CPU-shaped goo after a couple of days of hard graft.

HCS wants its PCs to be seen as the computing equivalent of a Bentley: performance machines with that hand-crafted touch. And that performance is there: in the 3DMark06 tests it kept pace with an Intel quad-core system, and on the higher resolution of 2560 x 1600 it even beat our test-bed PC.

These are PCs for the well-off gamer, and they won't be disappointed with scores like these. In both Company of Heroes and the graphically intensive Oblivion, it managed to outperform the quad-core PC on all counts. In CoH at 1280 x 1024 it managed an impressive extra 16fps over its competitor.

The 8800GTX sitting inside the monolithic Coolermaster Stacker case is what helps it keep up with the quad, but it's the CPU clock speed of 3.4GHz (on a 2.66GHz chip, mind) that pushes it ahead in most tests. However, there are few applications or games that fully take advantage of all four cores, so should you really splash the extra cash on the supposedly faster chip if not?