The amazing £4,000 beast you see here has been configured with one simple purpose in mind: to break the world record in the benchmark that many consider to be the de facto metric of overall CPU performance, SPEC CPU2006.

And has it pulled it off? Your bet your ass it has – it's officially the fastest desktop PC ever built, and it's absolutely jaw dropping.

To pull this off it requires no less than 1GB of system memory for each logical CPU.

You may not be surprised to learn then, that the £1,000 Core i7-965 Extreme Edition (reviewed here) forms the beating heart of the Fi7epower MLK1610. Thanks to Core i7's HyperThreading feature, that means a minimum of 8GB of extremely pricey high performance DDR3 memory is required.

And due to the novel triple-channel layout, the system actually packs 2GB plus 1GB per channel for a grand total of 9GB of Corsair memory. Just the CPU and memory alone have a face value of nearly £2,000.

Elsewhere, it's a similar story of best-in-class components. There's the obligatory HIS Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card, complete with two of AMD's awesome RV770 GPUs and 2GB of ultra-fast GDDR5 memory, as well as a terabyte of spinning-disk storage from Samsung.

Rock solid performance

But the CPU aside, the Fi7epower's snazziest feature is the £400 Intel X25-M solid-state drive. Granted, it's only 80GB.

But that's just about enough for a boot and application drive and it's so much better than a conventional rotating hard drive, it's not even funny. It's absolutely silent, it barely uses any power and it boasts ridiculously fast read speeds. Once you've gone SSD, you won't want to go back.

Another highlight is the Asus P6T motherboard. It's our first look at a third-party take on Intel's new X58 Express chipset.

For the most part, it has all the usual polish we've come to expect from Asus boards. For starters, this is the first desktop motherboard we've seen that supports both Nvidia's SLI and AMD's Crossfire multi-GPU graphics platforms, though Yoyotech has gone for a single card solution in this case.

You also get the ExpressGate quick-booting embedded OS. It's basically a cut-down Linux distro that boots in about five seconds and supports web browsing, instant messaging, photo browsing and all that jazz.

In practice, it's arguable how much use it really is. If nothing else, it makes the boot process a bit classier and Apple-esque.

Of more practical use is the Asus ScreenDuo, a small monochrome LCD display unit that connects via USB. Firstly it supports Vista's Sideshow auxiliary interface, allowing you to track emails and other updates without waking up the PC.

More importantly, it doubles as a handy overclocking controller, giving you the freedom to adjust operating frequencies on the fly.

That brings us neatly to the question of the P6T's overclocking prowess. Given the X58 chipset's shiny newness, we've yet to build a frame of reference for its outright overclocking potential.

But what we can say for now is that the P6T's BIOS needs a little work. Currently, it lacks options to individually adjust the CPU multiplier for each core and hence robs you of full control over the Core i7's turbo mode.

Also missing are options to adjust the TDC and TDP operating envelopes. These control the thermal and electrical current limits and are new for Core i7.