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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rupe120 - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
So no dual Opteron test?Nighteye2 - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
About the not working well with 4 sticks of RAM: maybe there are only 2 banks for each processor, given that each processor has it's own memory controller?MS - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
Wes,ok, I would need to check which version I am using .... D'UH, here it is: 3.43 from June 20 (release date). I guess I need oto check with nVidia and see whether there are newer drivers that increase performance :-)
Thanks!!
(gotto run a few errands now, be back later)
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
Michael,We don't generally use nVidia's IDE drivers either, but we do use the chipset driver set. The nForce unified drivers released just a few weeks ago appear to improve performance quite a bit on the nF3 compared to the earlier unified driver.
MS - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
Wes,Thanks for clearing that one up, actually I am just using a standard Barracuda SATA -V drive on the SiI controller without the nForce drivers, also, I am getting some 59.8 - 59.9 on the ASUS K8V and the ABIT KV8 MAX3 (VIA chipset)
With respect to the GunMetal benchmark, I am (presumably) using the same system as the one you have and the only thing that makes a difference there is how much eye-candy is turned on or off. --- I don't know either what to say here but GM appears to be more GPU limited than anything else. Which is why I would like to find out about your magic sauce for the FX-51..
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
Michael - The Dell is a 3.2 P4, while the Shuttle AN50R is an nForce3-150 Athlon64. You likely used nVidia's latest drivers, which do improve benchmark performance. We are using them for our upcoming reviews, but the nF3-150 scores were from earlier reviews using the slower earlier drivers. Those are likely the differences between your scores and ours.As I stated in the review, the Gun Metal 2 scores among FX51 chipsets remain a mystery. We are searching for answers.
MS - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
"While Dell just achieved the first Content Creation score to approach 60, the Titan FX scores almost 70 in the same test. The Titan FX score of 67.9 is almost 10 points higher than the best that we have ever seen in this benchmark. That is 10 points better than a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 running almost the same components in the Dell Dimension XPS."Huh???
We are getting over 60 with a standard Shuttle AN50R (single drive) and almost 65 with the FX-51 system, what's wrong here?
Also, I don't quite understand the GunMetal benchmark results of the FX51 system, can you elaborate on those, that is, why is the FX51 system so much faster than anything else? Just curious what it is that I am overlooking here...
Doop - Wednesday, December 3, 2003 - link
Well that's good Wesley Fink...AMD said they wouldn't work, you tested and they didn't work.Sorry for the comment about the article didn't mean to offend, I just usually expect AnandTech to be the most complete.
It just seemed obvious to me to wonder why they would ship a single only CPU in a dual mobo. Glad you made the effort to check. Take care.
stncttr908 - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
Wow, if I were rich and didn't build my own systems, this would be on my desk in a heartbeat.rupe120 - Tuesday, December 2, 2003 - link
So when will the article be redone with dual Opterons? :o)