Scan 3XS Vengeance review

The Vengeance is a machine best served cool and quiet…

TechRadar Verdict

Demonstrating exactly what you can do with the top end of this new generation of components.

Pros

  • +

    Awesome performance

  • +

    No compromise on components

  • +

    Whisper quiet

  • +

    Comparable with a hexcore rig

Cons

  • -

    There's not a lot you can do to better this

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We're not entirely sure who Scan Computers is aiming to exact its vengeance upon with this rig, but by the numbers the 3XS Vengeance is producing it's a pretty safe bet it's going to manage it.

This is the first full PC we've seen to actually put the new second-generation Intel Core platform into context. You'll have read just how good this Sandy Bridge platform is by now, but until you actually see it in a machine, it's tough to quantify.

The pairing of the Core i7-2600K and Nvidia GTX 580 could well be the top CPU/GPU partnership of the next six months or so, but until we get a few more rigs across our test benches, it's a hard to be certain. No matter the context, though, the only machine in the last year to come close to the 3XS Vengeance's performance numbers has been the CyberPower Charybdis.

That was a £2,000 machine sporting an overclocked Gulftown six-core CPU and twin 1GB GTX 460s running in SLI. Granted, that rig still has the performance lead, but only by a hair's breadth – and that's mostly down to the twin GPUs beating at the heart of the PC, rather than the CPU itself.