Scan 3XS Gamer
You can’t overclock it, but with its premium Coffee Lake chip, this is already a multi-talented powerhouse
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪
PRICE £1,375 (£1,650 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk/3XS
Our group test this month ( see p76) shows what companies can offer on a budget of £799, but what if you had twice that amount to spend? Scan is keen for you to double your money, and its main lure is a powerful Core i7-8700 Intel Coffee Lake CPU. The lack of a K suffix means two things: one, that you can’t overclock this system; and two, Scan still has one eye on the pennies.
This also shows itself in a standard SATA SSD rather than an ultra-fast NVMe drive, and with overclocking off the table there’s no need for a fancy watercooling system. But don’t be fooled: this is still a superquick system.
Much of this is due to the Core i7-8700. With six cores and 12 threads, and the potential to jump from a core clock speed of 3.2GHz to 4.6GHz, it blazed through our benchmarks. While it scored strongly in the image-editing test with 160, it was video-editing and multitasking – areas where multiple cores come in ever so handy – where it excelled, scoring 242 and 285 respectively. With an overall score of 250, this beats any sub-£2,000 Intel PC we’ve tested and fell only 20 points short of the £2,150, Ryzen 7 1800X-powered Yoyotech Redback N6 ( see issue 277, p59).
Some of that performance boost comes from Scan’s memory manipulation. It tweaked the BIOS so that the i7-8700 could support the supplied 16GB of RAM at 2,933MHz rather than the default 2,666MHz, all with a view to enhance this machine’s gaming performance.
When I first learned that Coffee Lake chips would cut down on core clock speeds in favour of higher core counts, I was worried that gaming speed – Intel’s key advantage over AMD Ryzen alternatives – would be hurt in the process. Not so: the 3XS Gamer doesn’t suffer from any CPU-induced bottlenecking at all, which is a considerable comfort bearing in mind how much of Scan’s budget was swallowed by the powerful, 8GB EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 SC Gaming graphics card.
Putting the system through the same tests as the PCs in the group test, the Scan showed its class with a 50.3fps results at Very High settings in Metro: Last Light at 1440p. Dropping down to 1080p saw an 89fps score. Only going all the way up to 3,840 x 2,160 caused problems, with the 3XS Gamer achieving a mere 21fps, but turning off SSAA (which you might as well, at such a high resolution) boosted this to 45fps.
It was a similarly flawless performance in Rise of the Tomb Raider: 139fps at 1080p Very High settings, 96fps at the same settings at 1440p. You won’t be shocked to hear that it scored 11 in SteamVR, which Steam understatedly describes as “Very High”.
Such raw power is almost enough to make you forget about some of this PC’s more mid-range leanings, such as its SATA SSD or
“Six cores and 12 threads, with the potential to jump from 3.2GHz to 4.6GHz, meant the i7-8700 blazed through our benchmarks”
rather small air cooler. That said, even these aren’t so bad: the SSD - a 250GB Samsung 850 Evo - managed respectable read and write speeds of 491MB/sec and 469MB/s respectively. The cooler - an Arctic Cooler Freezer 11LP - can get fairly loud when the CPU is really being pushed, but it’s not too noisy when idling or running games.
You also get a few more nods to proper luxury, such as the handsome Fractal Design Meshify C case, complete with tempered glass side and textured front panel. It’s a compact chassis but neat touches make it simple to tuck cables away out of sight – as Scan illustrates with its build.
The only big let-down for the 3XS Gamer is connectivity: there are two USB 2 and four USB 3 ports at the back, so you may need to make use of the two USB 3 ports on the front panel, and while there’s a healthy mix of DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI-D video outputs, the only audio connections are the three bog-standard 3.5mm audio jacks. For a system costing this much, I was hoping to see USB 3.1, USB-C and extra speaker outputs.
The 802.11n Wi-Fi card is a nice extra, though, while internal upgradability is also decent: you can add up to one extra 3.5in and 2.5in drive apiece, as well as two sticks of additional RAM and two M.2 devices on the motherboard.
Usually when PCs based on new CPU or GPU hardware are released, we advise you hold off on purchasing until we can try out a few different ones. With the 3XS Gamer, however, I can’t see many areas for improvement that wouldn’t also drive the price up. If you’re willing to pay for the absolute best, then it’s worth holding on for unlocked Core i7-8700K systems; if not, this is already a great buy.
SPECIFICATIONS
Hexa-core 3.2GHz Intel Core i7-8700 processor ● 16GB 2,933MHz SDRAM ● Asus Prime Z370-P motherboard ● EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 SC Gaming graphics card with 8GB GDDR5 memory 250GB Samsung 850 Evo SATA SSD ● 2TB Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM06 hard disk ● Windows 10 Home 64-bit ● 3yr warranty (1yr on-site, 2yr RTB, parts and labour)