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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Wesley Fink - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
#7 - While it is clear in the pictures in the review, I did not make specific mention that the MSI K8T Master motherboard requires a 24-pin connector (not a standard 20-pin ATX) and a 8-pin auxilliary power connector. This is the connector often used on other Dual-Processor, Workstation, and Server boards. As a result the choices for PS are more limited. In general, the 24-pin PS are higher quality.madgonad - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
ElitePC makes good products.I've bought two over the past ten years and both are still running great (although not in my house). They have excellent prices for less robust systems if your wallet isn't blessed enought for the $3k+.
And I did enjoy reading a review exposing the prior Dell paid-advert for what it really was. Nice recovery Anandtech. Gave Dell every chance in the world and they still blew it.
tfranzese - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
I don't think AMD has confirmed it and probably will never confirm it. It is most probably going to be something you see disappear in time because the FX was seemingly launched in a hurry to drive the nail into their 'performance crown' coffin.I've actaully seen no tests done with the FX's in pair, only read that they can be because the HT links were never disabled.
SUOrangeman - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
RE: #9 and #10I too was intrigued by the multi-processor A64FX remark. This was a bigger question mark before the Opteron 248 arrived. Still, has AMD confirmed that the FX line will work in MP mode ... and will they support it? It's kinda like the MP vs. XP+mod situation without some confirmation from AMD.
-SUO
Boonesmi - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
dang that is one very impressive system... for someone who doesnt want to build his/her own system, then this is about as good as it gets :)tfranzese - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
#14, I think the tweaking is just eliminating bottlenecks such as HDD bandwidth by using striped 10k rpm SATA drives. Just right there you are increasing access time, lowering CPU utilization, and lowering write times.I don't think there is very much else done in terms of tweaking that usual enthusaists such as you or I do to a system we build. Hitting nice CAS times, overclocking, etc are all tweaks that net an enthusiast machine better performance over stock, not tweaked equipment.
ArvinC - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
This system's scores are really impressive. I would really love to read an article discussing the "black art" of tweeking that some of these system builders use. I bet a lot of insight could be gained if one knew the exact system settings and tweeks builders like FNW, Voodoo, AlienWare, etc. use.Wesley Fink - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
#1 and #2 - The card is a 256mb Radeon XT, and the info has been corrected.tfranzese - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
#11, you seem very touchy. Anywho, you're pretty ignorant. Pioneer owns the DVD-R market in leadership, not Plextor - yet anyway. Also, there are few manufacturers who make their own drives and it's only foolish to pay more for the same drive just to have a certain name on it.destaccado - Monday, December 1, 2003 - link
#8 i said nothing about the writers being identical or not all i said is that they were trying to save a few dollars already by using generic equivalents.....if your spending 3g's you should be buying plextor 708's anyways....