Scan 3XS Gamer RTX
A superfast gaming system thanks to the all-new RTX 3080 graphics card, which delivers in style
PRICE £1,667 (£2,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
While AMD has enjoyed a phenomenal 2020, there’s one nut it hasn’t yet cracked: desktop graphics. Nvidia remains the connoisseur’s choice thanks to its support for ray tracing and the sheer monitor-cracking performance of top-end cards such as the RTX 2080 Ti. All of which would make most companies sit back and relax.
Nvidia, it turns out, isn’t prepared to go gently into that good night. With its RTX 30 series cards, it has torn up people’s expectations of an affordable graphics card. The RTX 3070 will cost £469 and promises speeds to match the £800-plus RTX 2080 Ti, while the RTX 3090 has gone on sale for £1,399 and makes the 2080 Ti look like a Tonka Toy.
For most sane people, though, it’s the RTX 3080 that will make fingers twitch over the Buy Now button. A retail price of £649 is hardly cheap, but with barnstorming performance that’s around 40% faster in demanding games than the 2080 Ti it still qualifies as a bargain. Even more so if it comes wrapped up in a stylish desktop PC that costs £2,000 – which is where the Scan 3XS Gamer RTX makes its grand entrance.
Modest beginnings
Although “grand” may be the wrong word. It seems odd to describe a £2,000 computer as great value, but that’s what Scan attempts to achieve here: rather than spend more than £500 on a top-of-the-line Intel Core i9, it saves £200 by opting for the Core i7-10700. This eight-core CPU can comfortably run at 4.6GHz with occasional hops to 4.8GHz – Scan includes its own-brand 3XS hydrocooler to help – but it pales in comparison to the ten-core i9-10900K or AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X.
This became obvious when I ran the 3XS Gamer RTX through our benchmarks. An overall score of 264 is hardly slow, but it looks decrepit next to the 420 of the Scan 3XS Vengeance XTi ( see issue 310, p64). Then again, this was powered by an i9-10900K overclocked to 5GHz, included 32GB of RAM to the Gamer RTX’s 16GB and costs £3,300.
For a better comparison, consider the £2,200 Chillblast Captain Flight Sim PC ( see issue 313, p45). Based around an eight-core Core i7-10700K capable of boosting up to 5.1GHz, this raced to 333 in our benchmarks. And if it’s sheer multicore power you’re looking for, any system using a Ryzen 9 3950X will make mincemeat of the i7-10700 thanks to the AMD’s 16 cores.
Game face
For most people, though, eight cores is plenty. And it’s certainly enough for games, which prefer high frequencies to endless cores. While I’m certain that an overclocked Core i9-10900K would have squeezed out a handful more frames per second from the RTX 3080 inside this PC, the more you spend, the more you hit the law of diminishing returns.
And you only need look at the top three graphs opposite to see that, in demanding games, the graphics card is king. In particular, the RTX 3080 delivers on Nvidia’s promise of a jump in generational power between the RTX 30 series and the 20 series. The fact that this card can run Hitman 2 a third faster than the 2080 Ti while costing almost half the price (and on a lesser CPU, note) is astounding.
Metro: Last Light is a good indication of how this PC will deal with older games. Notably, the RTX 3080 held its advantage at 4K, when the graphics card is the most important component, but the slower CPU held it back at 1080p.
However, if you’re using this PC to run old games then you’re wasting its power. The RTX 3080’s significance is that it can happily run modern games at 4K complete with ray tracing and DLSS (deep learning super sampling). That’s something even the RTX 20 series struggled to do. Take Metro Exodus. In its Ultra preset benchmark, with ray tracing and DLSS activated, an RTX 2070 Super might average 40fps, while a 2080 Ti can improve that to 50fps. The Gamer RTX averaged 58.8fps, and it did so without any signs of strain or rising fan noise.
Built to last
“The Scan 3XS Gamer RTX is the best and fastest gaming system we’ve ever tested for under £3,000, let alone £2,000”
As ever, Scan has paid great attention to cabling, meaning you’ll gaze lovingly through the tempered glass of the Fractal Design Meshify C chassis. The inside is dominated by that double-width
Asus graphics card, which almost overshadows the two strips of RGB lighting.
Scan chooses a midrange Asus motherboard based on the B460 chipset rather than Z490, arguing that the main benefit of the Z490 is for multi-GPU support – not something the RTX 3080 offers – and overclocking. Again, something of an irrelevance if you’re choosing a non-overclockable processor.
I’d have liked to see an aircooler rather than a watercooler, though, as the 240mm 3XS hydrocooler makes its presence felt with occasional clicks and brrrs even during idle times; both the Chillblast Captain and 3XS Vengeance XTi were notably quieter. To be fair, some of the hum comes from the two fans on the graphics card, and overall I’d still describe this as a quiet-running system.
There’s also room for expansion, with one x16 and two x1 PCIe sockets empty. With the 1TB SSD accompanied