Scan 3XS Chameleon Tyldesley

If I told you that you were a snowflake, you might think I had mistaken the pages of Custom PC for a nursery schoolbook. Teachers tell four-year-olds they're snowflakes to assure them that they're all unique individuals (and possibly to warn them to stay away from fire or they'll melt).

I'm telling you that you're a snowflake because PC builders create the same effect as snowfall. Snow turns the solid world into a soft world, one you can easily leave your mark on. Building, overclocking and modding your own computer allows you to understand, customise and alter an object that for most people is incomprehensible and unchangeable.

Scan's new 3XS Chameleon is a fully modded PC that reminds you of the effect of footsteps in the snow because of its paintwork. The case has been coated with thermochromic paint, so the colour changes according to temperature. Plant a warm hand on the side panel, and the dark green will melt away to yellow. You can make patterns using your finger, write your name or even draw smiley faces if you feel so inclined. You can also watch the case change colour depending on what task the PC is performing; for example, after half-an-hour of gaming, the side panel sported a fantastic bloom in the centre, just where the graphics cards are situated.

The green thermochromic paint is applied as a topcoat over maroon. So, after a few minutes of use, the Chameleon gradually changes colour from green to maroon. Leave it folding overnight, though, and the heat causes the thermochromic paint to become transparent, so the Chameleon goes yellow at its base, rising to a deep red at the top.

It's an amazing effect, with an equally amazing price, as it adds about £1,000 to the bill. The Chameleon PCs aren't cheap; they're designed as Scan's ultimate PCs and, had they been ready in time, we would have included one in the 2005 CPC Dream PC Labs test. The paint and case mods are all optional, but the version we had for review sported all the available bells and whistles, of which the thermochromic paint is just one.

To make the most of the colour-changing paint, the Chameleon needs to generate plenty of heat. It's an SLI system, of course, running a pair of overclocked XFX GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards. The GPUs have been clocked from 430MHz to a sizzling 490MHz, with the memory at 650MHz (1.3GHz effective).

Scan has used the new Asus SLI motherboard, the A8N-SLI Premium, and it plays host to 1GB of Corsair XMS 4400 RAM and - you'd never guess - the priciest processor that AMD makes, the Athlon 64 X2 4800+. This has been overclocked from its standard 2.4GHz speed to 2.76GHz, courtesy of a 230MHz FSB and a multiplier of 12. All of these are powered by a 580W Tagan PSU.

While the thermochromic paint would probably love it if all this hardware was barbecuing away in the open air, for the good of the company's customers and tech support staff, Scan has accompanied it with some very heavy-duty water-cooling equipment. Two separate loops are used, and they require so much space that Scan had to create a special extension outside the SilverStone TJ06 Temjin chassis.

A hefty external steel bracket hangs on the back of the case, like the PC equivalent of a blower ramming up through the hood of a 1970s muscle car. This external frame houses the triple 120mm fan radiator that cools the liquid keeping the dual-core Athlon 64 CPU cool.

Scan has also managed to get hold of the STORM, Swiftech's latest and greatest CPU waterblock, a whole month before us (we'll be reviewing it in the next issue). It's hooked up to massive 1/2in OD tubing, the hefty Swiftech MCP655 pump and a 5.25in bay reservoir. The second liquid-cooling loop handles the two GeForce 7800 GTX GPUs.

Again, it's mostly Swiftech kit, but it uses thinner tubing (10mm), a MCP600 pump, and is cooled by a single 120mm fan radiator. This loop's cylindrical reservoir is the only bit of kit not made by Swiftech. All of the tubing is kept neatly in check by the extensive use of Swiftech Coolsleeves, plastic wiring that wraps around the tubing to prevent it from kinking.

In addition to the four fans that cool the two water-cooling loops, there's a 120mm exhaust fan at the back of the case, and another that blows directly onto the graphics cards. This is because the old Achilles' heel of water cooling is still present: the waterblocks only cool the GPU, and not the memory or VRMs. Finally, there are two 80mm exhaust fans in the top of the case. This amount of cooling kit took Scan a long time to finalise, and was the main reason that the Chameleon missed the Dream PCs Labs test. However, the company has done a great job with it: the internal fans are all from Akasa's quiet Amber range, and the three fans on the external radiator are lit by clusters of icy white LEDs. In terms of noise, the Voodoo PC OMEN Extreme Gamer AMD X2, remains the quietest PC we've ever not heard. The Chameleon is audible, but not irritating, and the level of noise it produces is similar to that of the current Dream PC, the Armari Gravistar CoolFlow-X2.

The amount of water-cooling apparatus makes it a tough task to fit other kit inside the PC. As there are no free PCI slots, the sound card is an external USB Audigy 2 ZS, with Scan, rather bizarrely, opting for the Video Editor Edition, so it has enough video and audio inputs to start your own TV station.

What Scan has managed to fit inside, though, is the excellent XFX Revo64 S-ATA RAID controller card and five 74GB WD Raptors. Yes, these probably contribute more than the fans to the Chameleon's noise output, and they certainly bump up the price. They're configured in RAID, but in two separate arrays. Two run from the nForce4 chipset in RAID 0, holding Windows XP, while the remaining three run in RAID 3 from the XFX card. In this array, two of the drives are used for storage - so there's 148GB of space - while the third stores parity information; this means the array can cope if one drive fails. RAID 3 is a very neat way of providing speed and security, without the cost of RAID 0+1.

Finally, the Chameleon has two Sony DVD writers, and a floppy disk drive. There's also a memory card reader that's compatible with all of the major standards in one of the 3.5in bays. And, as if this wasn't enough, the case's interior has been given a luminous coating, so, in the dark, the insides glow through the Chameleon logo cut into the side panel.

PERFORMANCE

The Chameleon's CPU is the fastest Athlon 64 X2 we've come across; the Gravistar, our 2005 Dream PC, runs its CPU at 2.64GHz, thanks to a 220MHz FSB and a multiplier of 12. The Chameleon betters this slightly, with a 230MHz FSB, giving it a speed of 2.76GHz. Needless to say, it's the fastest PC we've ever seen in our new Media Benchmarks. Athlon 64s aren't that suited to video encoding, so the Chameleon's score of 1.28 isn't amazing, but in the multitasking test, it was almost 90 per cent quicker than our dual-core 2.8GHz Pentium D 820 reference PC.

As the Dream PCs were tested using the old benchmarks, we retested the Voodoo PC, which uses an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ running at 2.5GHz. It's no slouch, but in the new benchmarks, its overall score of 1.46 certainly followed the Chameleon's footsteps at a decent distance, as it scored 1.57 overall.

Games don't yet exist that can test two GeForce 7800 GTX cards in SLI. Far Cry was clearly CPU-limited, as the benchmark returned a score of 76fps regardless of what settings we applied, including anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and HDR.



CONCLUSION

The Chameleon has its downsides. At £5,499, it's phenomenally expensive, especially as that's for the system unit only, without a monitor, speakers or any peripherals. We would also query the use of five Raptors. The S-ATA II Samsung SpinPoint P120S is quicker, thanks to its higher data density, provides much more storage (250GB vs 74GB) and is far quieter too.

However, the Chameleon is still an amazing piece of work. Dream PCs aren't about counting pennies, and Scan hasn't pulled any punches. It's excessive; this is the PC version of the Deathstar and the Ferrari Enzo all in one. Whether anyone - customers or competitors - will follow in Scan's footsteps is another matter, but the Chameleon blazes a trail that's both bonkers and brilliant.

Author: Alex Watson

Scan 3XS Chameleon