Wired2Fire Hellspawn Xtreme review

Wired2Fire’s Hellspawn Xtreme is the first system to arrive in the PC Pro Labs touting AMD’s Radeon HD 6850 graphics. And in typical Wired2Fire fashion, it comes with not one but two of the monstrous things.

They’re not the highest-end cards, but plonking two of them together makes for some predictably strong benchmark results. An average of 65fps in our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High-quality Crysis benchmark is as good as we’ve seen in a PC, just edging ahead of our tests of the dual-GPU HD 5970 card. It’s also a massive 29fps faster than last month’s Yoyotech XDNA 760 with its Nvidia GeForce GTX 470.

The pair of cards excelled as we moved up the difficulty scale, with a score of 34fps in our 2,560 x 1,600 Very High-quality benchmark with 4x anti-aliasing. Nothing we’ve tested can match that, not even the brand new Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 580 – although of course this is two cards against Nvidia’s one.

So it’s our new fastest gaming PC, and it’s built inside Corsair’s Graphite Series 600T chassis. It’s striking despite the familiar meshed front, thanks to its matte black surround and squat, curved shape. Build quality is top-notch throughout, with thick, steel side panels that are released using a pair of clasps.

There’s more matte black finish inside, which, when combined with the black cables that snake from the modular PSU, makes for a stylish machine. The motherboard tray contributes to a tidy build, too; cables are hidden, and rubber-ringed holes allow cables to emerge only to access relevant ports and sockets.

The case is peppered with neat touches elsewhere. The bottom half of the meshed front can be removed with a click to access the 120mm fan and its dust filter, and detaching the top of the case allows installation of more case fans and half-height water-cooling reservoirs. There’s also a small lock that can secure the side of the chassis.

The front provides one USB 3 port – albeit routed from the backplate – alongside four USB 2 ports, audio jacks and FireWire. The rear provides a single USB 3 port alongside four more USB 2, two PS/2 ports, S/PDIF sockets and Gigabit Ethernet. Disappointingly, there’s no eSATA, but the USB 3 ports offer a different route to faster external storage.