Elite PC Titan FX: Setting New Standards in Gaming
by Wesley Fink on November 30, 2003 10:57 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Elite PC Titan FX: Chenbro Xpider Chassis
Elite PC uses the attractive Chenbro Xpider chassis for their Titan FX system. It is combined with a 460-watt power supply and offers outstanding expansion capabilities, particularly for hard drives. The silver and black case can mount up to 6 3.5" hard drives, and easily handles the 2 Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM drives in a RAID 0 array. A front mounted fan blows intake air across the hard drive cage to cool the drives.
The Titan FX uses black drives and peripherals to match the case.
Elite PC uses a huge 120mm fan for output air on the Titan FX. Large fans like this can turn at slow and quiet rpm, but still move massive amounts of air for cooling. Generally they are a better solution than small, noisy fans that must run at high rpm to move much air.
The Titan FX provides the see-thru side window seen on many gaming systems these days. It is also equipped with a Blue Neon case light.
Inside a front lift-open door are the front jacks, which include 3 USB, firewire, headphone and mic jacks.
With the motherboard, ATI Radeon XT, Creative Audigy 2, and MSI TV@nywhere card, there are a plethora of jacks on the rear panel. You get 2 more USB 2.0 jacks, the full complement of Audigy 2 audio I/O, digital and analog outputs on the ATI 9800 XT, video ports on the TV card, 10/1000 LAN port, parallel, and 2 serial, game and PS2 mouse/keyboard ports. The incredible selection of available ports on the delivered Titan FX should satisfy just about any expansion need.
Getting into the Titan FX case is fairly simple, since it is a screw-less design. Slide a lever at the left rear and the entire left side panel can be removed. The standard system is loaded with top-line components, as you can see in this photo.
With the case open, you get a good view of the simple, but effective, cooling system for the Athlon64 FX51. Cooling air is pulled into the case by an 80mm intake fan at the bottom front of the case. The CPU itself is cooled by an AVC/MSI heatsink-fan with thin copper fins and a 70mm fan. Hot air from the system is exhausted at the upper rear by a 120mm fan. While we did not measure noise level, the whole system is on the noisy side as shipped. Most of the noise is generated by the 120mm fan, which is turning at a much higher rpm than is necessary. We would strongly suggest using the Smart Fan features in the PC Health section of the BIOS to tie the 120mm fan to system temperature. Just doing this drops noise levels substantially without compromising system temperature. The good side to the high-speed 120mm fan is that you do have the option to move massive amounts of air for system overclocking.
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tfranzese - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
Doop, no I don't feel like a fool. It's better to be informed than be completely ignorant like yourself. Even Wesley, the guy who wrote this article, was under the impression the current FX's were dual capable. It could either have been fixed by AMD or fixed in the BIOs for all you know.As for sales, sales don't determine leadership. As for the 8x thing, being first to market a new speed does not make you the leader. Am I not the only one disappointed that it can't do 8x + and - R?
And no, no one mentioned Pioneer in this article but neither did they mention Plextor. And you're kidding yourself if you think Plextor has the same prestiege in the DVD burner market as they did with CD burners. Plextors are good, but speed isn't what makes you the best.
Tweak - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
oops, late post.Tweak - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
Well Mr Fink, can you answer the dual FX question for us?You changed the typos, but completely ignored this MUCH more important querry.
In any case, if the 940pin Fx's are dual compatible it would be a reason for the 940 pinners to remain in existance after the release of the 939pin. The performance of the new 939's will probably destroy single chip 940's configs.
TheRealMandak - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
1. The Athlon64FX IS an Opteron 148, a single server/workstation processor.2. The socket for the FX, vill change to 941. So you might get problems with upgrading this system or have to use Opteron's at a higher price. "hint" Change'en socket might give a small price drop to the FX, since it cannot work in servers/workstations any more. Properly depends on Prescott performance (but this is a guess).
3. It is not recommended to use 4 DIMMS in a single Athlon64/FX processor system, it will reduce performance.
4. The MSI K8T Master2 is NOT supporting dedicated RAM for both Processors in a dual setup. As the socket 940 designs describes. The 2.end Processor has to go through processor number 1, using Hyper Transport. Result, latency!!! And reduced performance. The MSI K8T Master2 not a great dual board. Maybe cheep but not great.
destaccado - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
#12 I said nothing negative about pioneer, and in terms of leadership do you mean sales? That pioneer may lead but I seem to recall plextor having the first 8x drive to market...that signifies leadership to me....and why would you bring up pioneer? They aren't using pioneer who makes really good burners, they're using MSI, now I'm not saying MSI is bad but you'd think for 3g's........AMDjihad - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
in yomammas face intel. you suck suck suck. Iknew this is much better, over 30000 3dmarks its better than anyting intel will make in the next years from prescott to tjas. amd will be market leader soonmizzouXC - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
I think these benchmarks are unfair to the Barton 3200+ setup. Every other system had Raid 0. While this won't make much difference in the brute force FPS competition, it does play into the everyday use (office) benchmarks. Other than that great comparison. I'd like to see these comparisons when we actually have a 64 bit O/S and 64 bit software....Doop - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
err tfranzese you feel like a fool now? Perhaps YOU should read the reviews before spouting complete bollocks about Athlon FX dual capability.tfranzese - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
Wesley, interesting. Is the second CPU showing in the system hardware section of XP's control panel? That should let you know if it's running as a dually or not.Wesley Fink - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
Elite PC has provided an update on Dual Processor usage. <em>"The only AMD processors that can be run in DUAL mode are the 200 and 800 series Opteron processors. The motherboard in the Titan FX machine will run all 940 pin processors, however only the 200 and 800 series Opteron processors will run as Dual processors."</em> We have just tried to benchmark the Titan FX system with 2 FX51, and while the system worked, the boot screen only identified ONE CPU even though two were installed. Oddly, the few benchmarks we ran were higher than single CPU, but not at the levels we would expect with Dual Opteron chips. Elite PC recommends the 200 or 800 Opterons for Dual CPU operation.An update with this information has been added to the review.