Product Reviews

Scan's latest Chameleon system may have a mouth-drying price, but then this is no run-of-the-mill PC. Two of the most powerful graphics cards currently available join AMD's fastest processor, a contingent of five high-speed hard disks and - the most expensive 'component' of all - a custom heat-reactive paint job. Turn the PC on and a green neon light installed on the floor of the machine shines out through the Chameleon-shaped motif on the side. As the machine heats up, the chassis colour gradually changes from maroon to bright yellow. It isn't the best way we can think of to spend an incredible £960, but it's definitely eye-catching.

Inside, both of the 7800 GTXs are overclocked to 490MHz, up from the standard 430MHz, and the 3D benchmark scores were staggering: 80fps in Far Cry at 1,280 x 1,024 with 4x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. Increasing the resolution to 1,600 x 1,200 didn't phase the Chameleon either: 75fps means that no matter how large your screen, you'll be able to find a playable frame rate in any game currently on the market. Our Doom 3 tests were even more impressive: at 1,280 x 1,024 with 4x AA and 8x AF, we saw 100fps, and upping the resolution to 1,600 x 1,200 saw just a slight drop to 86fps.

While the Chameleon is clearly designed to appeal to gamers, AMD's FX-57 will make short work of any task. However, it has only a single processing core, albeit a very fast one, so it won't make the most of multiple-application environments. It's certainly enough for the foreseeable future, though, and backed up with 1GB of PC3200 RAM from Corsair it scored 1.26 in our new real-world benchmarks.

The Asus A8N SLI Deluxe is a fine motherboard choice. Eight USB 2 ports and two FireWire leave plenty of scope for peripherals, and six free

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SATA connectors, a pair of PCI Express 1x slots and two free standard PCI slots make other additions simple. As befits the top-dollar price, the internals of the Scan are tidy, and cable ties keep wires free of tangles and clear of cooling fans. No fewer than four cooling fans are installed in the case: two in the roof, one in the front and one in the back. The CPU is enclosed in a clear plastic air tunnel to ensure heat is ducted straight out of the machine rather than warming up the rest of the PC. All those fans inevitably means more noise, and even with the CPU fan turned down you'll know when the Chameleon is working. At least they're all large-diameter fans, so the noise is more a rumble than a whine.

The five hard disks are located in a dedicated bay above the motherboard. Each one is a 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor drive with a capacity of 74GB, and they're arranged in two RAID arrays. The first is a two-disk RAID0 array designed to hold the system files, connected to nVidia's nForce4 RAID chip. The three other disks are connected to a three-port XFX Revo 64 RAID card. These disks are configured in a RAID3 array (striping plus one disk for parity checking). Looking after backup is an equally over-the-top pair of Sony DW-Q28 DVD writers.

Included in this price is Creative's Audigy 2 ZS Video Editor. Given the single-minded power of the system, it's an interesting addition and supplies a raft of AV input and output options, including S-Video, composite and DV-in ports, plus S/PDIF digital audio. It also adds four more USB ports.

But the main issue with the Chameleon is value for money. It's about £2,000 more than the Evesham Axis Decimator 78, which has a near-identical graphics setup, a dual-core processor and a 17in TFT. Even the SavRow Deuterium looks like good value for money at £4,510. It doesn't have the same 3D graphics grunt, but it does boast water-cooling, an overclocked dual-core processor and a stunning 23in widescreen TFT; the Chameleon's price is for the system box only.

We also have a problem with the warranty; for this much money, we'd expect more than a single on-site year. If you have the cash and want a no-holds-barred performance PC that will play the latest games for years, as well as serving as a talking point, the Chameleon is just the ticket, but you can have similar performance for far, far less.