Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire review

AMD’s Radeon HD 6970 is one of our favourite graphics cards thanks to its blistering speed. It’s beaten in our benchmark tests only by dual-GPU cards and the expensive Nvidia GeForce GTX 580, so if there’s one way to guarantee we’ll salivate at the sight of a new PC, it’s to use two of these monsters.

That’s what Wired2Fire has done with its new Hellspawn XFire, and as we started testing it quickly became apparent it’s a potent combination. In Crysis, our Low, Medium and High quality gaming tests were brushed aside, and a score of 92fps in our Very High quality benchmark run at 1,920 x 1,080 is the best we’ve ever seen from a PC. The previous record-holder, the Palicomp Phoenix Hydro-X, scored “only” 84fps.

The Wired2Fire delivered record-breaking scores in our more demanding tests, too. Crysis run at 2,560 x 1,600 with 8x anti-aliasing enabled is our trickiest test, and the Hellspawn rattled through at 48fps. That’s 7fps and 17% faster than the Palicomp, and further ahead of the CyberPower Liquid i7 Kraken and Chillblast Fusion Dimension, which both made do with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 580.

Wired2Fire hasn’t neglected the processor. Intel’s Core i7-2600K is one of the most powerful chips around short of extortionate Extreme Edition parts, and the 3.4GHz stock speed has been boosted to a more potent 4.8GHz. The result is an application benchmark score of 1.26 – a significant leap over the stock performance and enough power to handle any application.

The rest of the specification is good, with 8GB of RAM, and there’s a Blu-ray reader too. Solid-state storage is provided by a 120GB Corsair SSD, and there’s a 2TB drive alongside.

The chassis

The stupendous level of gaming power is contained within a no-nonsense chassis. Corsair’s 650D looks plain compared to the Palicomp’s curves and angles and the Chillblast’s red interior, but its matte-black metal and clean lines make for a stylish-looking build. And despite the lack of extravagance around the design, there’s plenty to like about the 650D. For starters, there’s the build quality: the entire construction is hewn from rigid steel and feels as strong as any we’ve laid hands on.