Scan 3XS Vengeance RTX Ti
Truly ludicrous amounts of power for gaming and creativity thanks to cutting-edge components
PC
SCORE
PRICE £2,750 (£3,300 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
As the saying goes, a gamer and his money are soon parted. If you’ve managed to resist the allure of an upgrade for the past couple of years, though, this system may just be enough to push you over the edge. Of course, it has cuttingedge technology. Of course, it’s stupidly fast. Of course, you should probably stop reading this review if you don’t have £3,300 kicking around your bank account.
Let’s address its size first. For readers who aren’t familiar with the NZXT H710 chassis, this mid-tower ATX case puts airflow and expandability as top priorities over compactness; it’s more akin to a workstation chassis than a standard system. With a retail price of £140 from Scan, it’s packed with quality from the galvanised steel exterior to the huge pane of tempered glass.
Another tangible benefit of this investment is that it allows Scan to create an almost silent-running system, as it provides space for the Corsair Hydro H150i liquid CPU cooler to slide in. While this requires three fans to draw away heat, and there’s a fourth rear-mounted fan too, you will barely notice the Vengeance RTX Ti in day-to-day use. It’s only when you push it with games or other compute-intensive tasks that this beast will roar.
Raw speed
And what a beast it is. We’ve run out of superlatives for AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture, which not only allows the latest Ryzen chips to deliver single-threaded speed to match Intel’s best offerings but – thanks in no small part to its 7nm manufacturing process – makes it possible for AMD to produce a
16-core, 32-thread processor that doesn’t cost a fortune.
We dedicated a full page to the Ryzen 9 3950X last month ( see issue 305, p72), but the key takeaway about this £750 processor is that it’s a brilliant choice for anyone who works in content creation. Those 32 threads will slice their way through rendering tasks in no time, as reflected by this machine’s score of 8,816 in Cinebench R20. That’s 25% quicker than the original Ryzen Threadripper 1950X. If you’re more familiar with Cinebench R15 results, note its scores of 172.4fps and 3,911cb.
A closer look at our benchmarks reinforces the point. An image-editing score of 217 is, by definition, 2.17x faster than our reference Intel Core i7-4670K system, which demonstrates its single-threaded speed. While a doubling of speed in seven years (the 4670K was released in 2013) doesn’t sound much compared to the 500% increase we see elsewhere, that’s an outstanding score for a non-workstation chip. Compare it to the 173 of the Intel Core i9-10980XE on p61.
Then we come to multithreaded performance. Video and multitasking scores of 503 and 633 respectively are simply absurd levels of speed, all reinforced by the 32GB of memory Scan supplies. Note these are supplied via two 16GB DIMMs, so there’s space for two more if required.
PCIe 4.0
We don’t normally dwell on storage speed – it’s rarely a point of differentiation between PCs – but because the RoG Strix motherboard uses AMD’s X570 chipset you benefit from native PCIe 4.0 support. Scan takes advantage by including a 2TB Corsair MP600 M.2 SSD, which returned simply scandalous sequential read and write speeds of 4,157MB/sec and 3,864MB/sec respectively. That’s by far the fastest scores we’ve seen.
The motherboard’s two x16
PCIe slots also support version 4.0, but we still wait for cards that can take advantage of this. For now, Scan chooses the fastest consumer graphics card that money can buy: the 11GB Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti. If that still isn’t enough for you, the motherboard supports Nvidia SLI for a second card, although we recommend that you upgrade the 650W power supply to an 800W unit.
For now, though, even the toughest games will run at 4K. This might not be obvious from the
Scan’s official result of 22.3fps in our Hitman 2 test, but that’s with truly challenging settings of 2x super sampling, 16x anisotropic filtering, best simulation quality and a mix of High and Strong settings elsewhere. When I dropped the super sampling down to 1x, it returned a result of 78.5fps.
In truth, though, this machine is overkill for gaming, and if that is your top priority then I suggest you save a little money by switching to an Intel Core i9-9900K processor. While an SLI setup based on dual GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards will still
“Video and multitasking scores of 503 and 633 are simply absurd levels of speed, all reinforced by the 32GB of memory”
cost significantly more than £3,300, you’ll see a big boost in games that support dual cards.
Expansion packs
Scan doesn’t supply a secondary disk, but it’s so easy to add one yourself that you might as well hold off doing so until necessary. One route is to remove the right-hand side of the case, but that’s a matter of pressing a button to pop it off. Here, you’ll find two easy-access caddies for 2.5in
SSDs, along with a caddy with two bays for 3.5in drives. Adding these requires more work, though, as you must turn the case upside down to unscrew the caddy.
If you aren’t worried about spoiling the RGB light show through the tempered glass side with boring 2.5in drives, you can add three more here too. Two caddies sit above the casing that holds the power supply, with a third latching on to the side. In short, there’s more storage capacity here than most people will ever need.
With an 802.11n wireless card in one of the PCIe 1x slots, three PCIe slots lie empty for upgrades. Aside from adding a second graphics card, however, there are few obvious reasons to do so. Audiophiles might want more quality than the SupremeFX audio chip can provide, but with five audio jacks and an optical S/PDIF out there’s no shortage of rear outputs.
All those outputs sit on the rear of the board, and NZXT expects people to use the rear panel for most USB connections; top-mounted ports are restricted to two USB-A 3.1 Gen 2, with a USB-C 3.1 port in place alongside a 3.5mm headphone jack.
As ever, Scan makes upgrades all the easier thanks to its excellent build quality. The company should run lessons in cable management, with everything tied down firmly in place and cleverly routed to avoid a mess anywhere. Even at the rear of the motherboard, which can often hide a rat’s nest of cables. If and when you do upgrade, and start severing those carefully placed cable ties, it will feel like sacrilege.
Our final note goes to the threeyear warranty, with the whole of the first year being on-site. This is often overlooked, but if something does go wrong then you’ll appreciate it. Also note the personalised 16GB flash drive that Scan attaches via Velcro to the bottom of the chassis. Yet another neat touch that you’ll appreciate if Windows refuses to load.
Scan should run lessons in cable management, with everything tied down firmly in place and cleverly routed to avoid a mess anywhere”
Splash out?
As I wrote earlier, this is too much to spend on an out-and-out gaming PC. You can buy a system with similar levels of gaming performance for less money, and you have to wonder about how much Nvidia is charging for the RTX 2080 Ti. At around £1,100, it’s by far the most expensive component in this machine.
The reason Scan chose it for this system is obvious, though. If you want a screamingly fast PC, you don’t want weak points. And this system has zero weaknesses, other than its price. If you can justify the outlay, and are going to exploit the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X to its glorious full, it’s still excellent value.
SPECIFICATIONS
16-core 3.5GHz AMD Ryzen 9 3950X processor Asus RoG Strix X570-F Gaming motherboard 32GB 3,200MHz DDR4 RAM 11GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics Corsair Hydro H150i RGB Pro CPU cooler 2TB Corsair MP600 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD NZXT H710 chassis 650W Corsair RMX 80Plus Gold PSU Windows 10 Home 230 x 516 x 494mm (WDH) 3yr warranty (1yr on-site, 2yr parts and labour RTB)