Scan 3XS Node Titan review

Scan has brought its famously tidy PC building to the poky Fractal chassis. Cables run in lines along the bottom of the case, others are tied to the Node’s metal skeleton, and some are even lashed to the power supply.

For all Scan’s attention to detail, though, the internals remain tricky to get to. The motherboard can only be accessed by removing the chunky Antec Kühler H2O 920 cooler, and the power supply is right at the bottom of the case, buried beneath hard disk cages and a bushel of cables. There’s little upgrade room: two SATA cables are installed and snake towards a single free hard disk cage, which can accommodate a pair of drives, but that’s your lot.

And we’d advise against further overclocking as the chassis and cooler configuration already struggle to keep the components cool. At peak load, the overclocked processor hit a toasty peak temperature of 92°C – only 13°C short of the chip’s thermal maximum – and the graphics card’s peak of 82°C is high as well. The Scan’s idle power consumption of 82W is reasonable, and this rose to 427W at peak – higher than the Wired2Fire’s 393W top draw.

Noise is less of an issue: the Scan is quiet when idling, and louder during intensive benchmarking than the Wired2Fire was, but cranking the volume up on your speakers will quickly mask its low rumble.

This Scan is an excellent PC, then, and a Titan in more than just name. It’s the fastest gaming PC it’s possible to imagine, incredibly quick in application and storage tests, and well put-together, too. But the cost of that Nvidia graphics card pushes the price to a truly ridiculous level, and with the far cheaper Wired2Fire matching its application and storage benchmark results, you’d have to be mad to spend the extra.