Product Reviews

Cube247 doesn't do things by halves: two months ago it produced a triple-screen PC, the Hercules ST2, and now the first system we've seen with twin ATi cards. This takes advantage of ATi's much heralded CrossFire technology.

It's clear the Serpens is built for performance. The Athlon 64 X2 4400+ is only a step away from the very fastest around, with more than enough power for present-day applications and beyond. There's 1GB of PC3200 Corsair RAM, and the hard disk array offers 400GB of storage, striped for performance across two Seagate Barracuda drives. These core components combined to produce a lightning-quick application benchmark result of 1.15.

The truly interesting aspect of the Serpens, however, is the pair of ATi X800 XL graphics cards. Installed in an EQS A72K9-CF motherboard, they join forces via an external link-up cable that channels the power of both cards onto one monitor, theoretically doubling the 3D performance. At our demanding settings of 1,280 x 1,024 with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic

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filtering, Half-Life 2 ran at 71fps, while Far Cry ran at a speedy 69fps.

Doom 3 was the star of the show, though, improving its non-CrossFire score by 60 per cent, to a frame rate of 62fps. It's also worth noting that the Cube247 Serpens was supplied to us with beta drivers - we're promised a 10 per cent performance increase when the official drivers are released.

The Serpens' high spec continues with Creative's Audigy 2 ZS sound card, relieving the onboard sound chip of its duties. Eight-channel sound and THX certification make this a fantastic card for home cinema, but it's hamstrung by the merely adequate Creative T7900 speakers included - they're fine for movies and games, but will struggle in a big room. The optical drive is a dual-layer DVD rewriter, writing to all formats except -RAM discs, and is joined by a DVD-ROM drive for disc-to-disc duties.

The Serpens uses the same chassis, monitor, keyboard and mouse as the Hercules we reviewed two months ago, which means the same drawbacks. The case isn't inspiring in its looks or build quality, and the monitor's pixel-tracking problems and viewing angles aren't up to panels such as the 21.3in NEC that comes with the A-Listed Evesham Axis Blaze 1800 XL.

And it's the Blaze that causes the problem for Cube247. For the same price, you're getting that stunning TFT, ATi's latest graphics processor, plus a spare PCI Express 16x slot to see you into the future. As a first CrossFire PC, the Serpens is an interesting piece of technology, but the Evesham outperforms it, as well as offering more potential for the future.