Scan's 3XS Great White gaming rig is extreme, not quite £11,000 extreme
By Darren Murph 
posted September 1st 2008 6:34PM
posted September 1st 2008 6:34PM
British computer maker Scan is mighty, mighty proud of its 3X Great White. Aside from blasting a Silverstone TJ07B case with an astonishingly corny logo, the outfit is also charging a staggering £11,171.18 ($20,225) for the soon-to-be-outdated rig. Granted, it does pack an impressive amount of cutting-edge hardware -- three 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 HDDs (alongside two 64GB OCZ SSDs), a 4.4GHz overclocked Core 2 Quad Q9650 CPU, 2GB of Corsair DDR3 RAM, three 1GB NVIDIA GTX 280 GPUs and enough LEDs to light up a small basement (among other things) -- but we still can't justify trading out a good portion of your kid's college education for a machine very capable of dominating Crysis. But if you can, the buy link is just a few clicks away. Just don't tell the wife, nor anyone that we told you not to tell the wife.[Via WebCrunchDeals]
Let alone the 550 Watts of continuous power needed by the beast on idling
Let alone the 550 watts on continous power needed by this beast on idle.
you're right, noone would ever need 3TB of disk, or more than 640K of memory, er, I mean 2GB.
three disks means raid5, 2TB of usable.
at least this thing will be able to run vista at a useable speed!
The memory is obviously a typo. http://3xs.scan.co.uk/ShowSystem.asp?SystemId=827 states: 4GB (2x2GB) Corsair Dominator, DDR3 PC3-16000 (2000)
Who in their right mind would put 2GB of RAM in a dream PC??
@Engadget Team: You need to stack up on RedBull so you can read the monitor better.
Who in their right mind would put only 4GB of RAM in a $20,000 PC?
Im waiting for the it looks like a mac comment.
:p (yes it may do but i don't care).
if i had the money i'd build abetter one.
Good GOD. For that kind of money you could buy a fucking CAR.
and get LAID! ))
You could probably buy a regular one, too. ;)
So is that like, a car with really comfy seats and good shocks or what?
i believe this product is aimed at those who aren't interested in one and don't have the hopes of the other.
We're going to need a bigger boat.
!! SHARK !! Everyone out of the water......
scan have a shop at horwich near Bolton(I'm a yocal) where they have a few of their pc's set up. Rather than having a pc turned on with a screensaver they run crysis though had a go and they ran the game on 1680x1050x32 with vsync, 16x aa (not regular as but higher remember what it was called), very high on everything.
I couldn't remember the command for crysis to show the framerate but I'm fairly sure it ran at above 60fps.
Also skulltrail is awesome but there isn't any major advantage for playing games. As you don't get a big speedboost
I could build this for 11 grand and buy an albino hooker, a bucket of chicken, a 6 pack & a whole bottle of melatonin with the other 9 grand.
Funny they charge so much when other than the case anyone can really easy make the same computer for about 1/4 the cost!
Talk about a rip off lol.
Bet I could make a faster computer for way cheaper!
This thing could eat your wallet.
shut up
but we dont have any money left
grr, ignore these posts, it didnt attach
I'd call this PC one of the greatest ways to throw away money if I could justify any other method than giving it to me xD
And in one year, all the components will be outdated....
May be less than that, hold on while I check up on the Nehalem ETA to market..
Will it blend??
Heck yes it will. That overclocked C4Q could crush through any scene you throw at it like it's nothing.
dose it make a Cappuccino too?
If it doesn't, will you take out your anger by killing it with a hatchet?
These guys are overcharging what...an easy $15,000 USD, maybe freakin' more?
You could find a better computer for under 6 grand, of course not the ridiculously overclocked CPU but almost $21 thousand dollars not counting tax for this?!!?!!?!!
Yowzerrs!
I think I'd take a Skulltrail rig over this. One processor just isn't enough for this kind of money.
Weak specs
Ditch the SSDs. Marketing hype for the time being. Dump in a couple of enterprise grade 73GB Seagate Savvio 15K.1 SAS drives for real performance.
SSDs would easily outperform those drives when it comes to gaming usage.
And quite frankly those drives are annoyingly noisy in a home desktop, server farms might not care about noise but home users do.
so lets go to newegg and put together the a computer with the same specs and compare costs. I bet it could be done under $4,000.00 for sure
those 64gb ocz ssds are now about 220.00
Sure it can. I can even beat you with an iPhone. See. *WHACK WHACK WHACK!*
custom paint 850 pounds?!?! I spent less than that trying to paint half my house...
but will it play crys...oh wait, that's been answered in the post
29 g's and not even a skulltrail rig...id rather have that guys folding at home superrig engadget featured a while back..didnt it have like 80 top of the line nvidia cpus...i know that could play crysis...2 gb of ram and this thing might be sketch in crysis..pass
Man I'd expect a lot more than 2 64GB SSDs at that kind of idiotic price. And what's with the CPU being less than top of the line?!
My yearly electricity bill better be included in the price.
The specs look like something a person who has only a modicum of computer knowledge, but thinks they have more, might buy if they won the lottery and decided to go all out. Is that the market they're targeting here?
This machine has 2x 2GB sticks of memory. Not 2Gb.
C'mon Engadget, as a massive fan of the blog I'd have thought you could at least get specifications right.
This is the dream PC 2008 winner, a competition to build the biggest and best computer that there is. It's the IT equivalent of a sports car and believe me, people buy this and are happy with our service.
All of you are missing the point... this is a DREAM PC.. If you had the money and wanted the fastest commercially available PC on the market, this is it.
OK it might not represent real world value, but if you want to look at the dictionary.com you can find several definitions of Dream. Number 3 being "an object seen in a dream." number 8 being "something of an unreal beauty, charm, or excellence" and number 15 being "most desirable; ideal: a dream vacation".
Now some of you people out there who think there is nothing better on a weekend than to get at your CPU with a big vat of Liquid Nitrogen great, those of you who have the money to blow on a stupendously expensive PC and not worry about building it, repairing it if it were to fail or anything, then buy a PC.
Ok you can go to any PC components website and put the components in your basket and come to a lower figure than the retail price but what about the hours put in to mod it, build it, over clock it, software it, test it, then you have the warranty on there as well. And the monitor, which is £600 ($1200), the speakers and ancillery components.
As I first said, you guys are missing the point, if you were to look further into things you would see that Scan don't just make £11,000 PC's but good value ones as well. Maybe you should have a look around before spouting off about things you really know nothing about.
To the person who expects 32GB of RAM on a gaming board with 4 slots, do you see any 8Gb 2000Mhz DIMMs around???
Thought not.........
:)
It’s good to see the exposure of the SCAN Great White system, including the Graphic taken from our web site, but a shame most of the facts left out, so here we go… ïŠ
I have read through most of comments, most not really on the factual side but still quite amusing. On a serious or shall we say factual note the SCAN White Shark is the fastest commercial available PC ever.
Custom PC in there own words don't review many pre-built systems as most PC manufacturers are more interested in mass-producing dull, money making boxes than in designing a machine that is truly special. Every Year Custom PC challenges the world's leading PC manufacturers to wow them with their insight and design skills.
For over 6 months every part of the White Shark PC has been specked with the title “Dream PC" in mind, this isn't a PC to buy to browse the internet or to do you homework, but a PC for the enthusiast, which I agree would have to be fairly wealthy to purchase a PC like this kind of system. The White Shark PC is not aimed at our mass marked but a niche market of enthusiast customer's who can realistically buy a bespoke PC professional built to this specification have expressed interest in this particular PC already.
Anyone suggesting they can build this system for 1/4 of the cost or this specification indicating a "modicum of computer knowledge" is delusional and this comment really did make me laugh :) - However of course I am open to be proven wrong and invite anyone to make an entry to Custom PC next Year if you fell you can do better :).
This is a Dream PC and has been specked as such, which reflects in the price, some of the features namely the case, which is chromed Aluminium. Anyone that is in the know will understand the technical difficulty of Chroming Aluminium; we found it extremely difficult to find a Company willing to do this because it is so difficult to effectively chrome Aluminium, hence the cost. All other components have been cherry picked to give the best performance, which does not mean the most expensive in all cases.
SCAN Computers builds and configures a wide range of systems, ranging in specifications to meet the requirements any customer may have from the standard home user to the extreme gamer.
To understand the concept behind the Dream PC and a full professional review of the White Shark System you can find the review (Link coming soon)
Regards
Here is the link to the SCAN Great White PC review
http://3xs.scan.co.uk/downloads/CPC61_DPC08_GreatWhite.pdf
Best Regards
Change of plan - Please use the following link
http://www.scan.co.uk/downloads/CPC61_DPC08_GreatWhite.pdf
Best Regards
it says on the scan link, 4GB of DDR3, not 2GB mentioned in the engadget article?
To be fair, I believe PC's like this need to be factored into the PC average cost when debating a 'Macs are more expensive than PC's" arguement.
4GB of RAM, not 2.
4GB (2x2GB) Corsair Dominator, DDR3 PC3-16000 (2000), timed 5-5-5-15, to be exact.