Systems

Overclockers UK Ultima Scarab Crysis Review

vortez
April 29, 2013 18 Min Read
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With some of the very best AMD hardware to date onboard, how will the Ultima Scarab Crysis from OcUK perform in our tests?


Product on Review: OcUK Ultima Scarab Crysis
Manufacturer and Sponsor: Overclockers UK
Street price: £1300 inc. VAT (At time of review)

To many consumers, building or selecting components for a computer can be a daunting task. If not for the expertise required in having to pair up compatible hardware but also the construction of it. Overclockers UK are well-known for their wide selection of computer components, many system builders are confident in choosing their own hardware to play with but OcUK also supply pre-built systems to help those who are less tech savvy or who prefer to leave it to the experts to select hardware and build it. This removes the responsibility of having to pair up compatible hardware and assists those who simply want a system delivered that is ready to go as soon as you unpack it.

Today we will be taking a look at OcUK’s Ultima Scarab Crysis. A rather capable gaming system based around AMD’s Piledriver platform and boasting more AMD delight from ASUS and Sapphire, in the Crosshair V Forumla-Z and HD 7970 OC Boost. The ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z is regarded as one of the best 990FX motherboards currently on the market and the HD 7970 is again, a top-pick for gamers demanding high-end performance.



Almost every component in this system sticks to a red and black theme as those are the colours of AMD. This carries throughout the system as you will soon see. Firstly, lets see what OcUK have to say about this AMD focussed system and then we will head into the review and discover how it performs in our test suite.

Overview
Experience Crysis 3 like it was meant to be, with the “Ultima SCARAB Crysis” system. Built and designed from the ground up to play Crysis 3 at maximum settings. Based around the versatile AMD 990FX Chipset, the “Ultima SCARAB Crysis” uses an AMD FX-8 8350 CPU, with eight core technology you can exploit the extra available power to your advantage. Overclocked and guarenteed to a solid 4.60GHz, you can extract every ounce of performance out of this monsterous CPU. With high clock speeds come great scalability with the graphics cards for maximum FPS. Outfitted with 16GB of DDR3 Patriot Viper 3 “Venom Red” memory running at a swift 1866MHz, plenty quick enough to allow you to multitask faster than ever before. The Patriot Red Venom along with the Prolimatech Megahalem RED CPU Cooler and red fans throughout this system looks absolutely mind blowing.

Specifications

The system consists of the following components:

System Specs
CPU AMD Piledriver FX-8350 @4.6GHz
CPU Cooler Corsair H80i
Motherboard ASUS Crosshair V Formula Z 990FX
RAM Patriot Viper 3 “Venom Red” 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-14900C10 1866MHz
GPU Sapphire HD 7970 OC BOOST 3072MB (Crossfire option available)
Solid State Drive(s) Samsung 120GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD (Upgrade options available)
Hard Disk Drive(s) Seagate Barracuda 1TB Storage HDD (Upgrade options available)
Wireless Asus USB-N10 Micro USB Network Adapter Wireless-N 150Mbps
Power Supply Corsair TX V2 850W
Case Cooler Master HAF X
Operating System Windows 7 or 8
Warranty 2 Year

Packaging


The rig will turn up on your doorstep in the box that the case was originally shipped in; however, it will have a full-blown, top end AMD system inside. To our surprise, there was no additional foam protection inside the system like our previous system review of the OcUK Ultima 9550i Tyrannosaur MkIII. We can see why this is the case, though. There is no heavy air cooler on the CPU which can easily become damaged in transit and the GPU is fairly secure anyway. If there were multiple graphics cards installed, perhaps there would have been some form of protection inserted to keep them secure. Along with the system, you will also receive all of the accessories which come with the motherboard and the graphics card(s).







A Closer Look


Opening the case reveals the tidiness of the system within. Attention to detail ensures that the cables are routed in the optimum ways and therefore it leaves the system looking sleek, as well as improving overall airflow.



Similar efforts have gone into ensuring that the back of the system is tidy and that the side panel can fit on without any effort. The cables appear to have been tied in such a fashion whereby you can access the cable(s) which you may require in the future for an extra graphics card (just one example) without disturbing the rest of the cables. Planning ahead is always a good thing in our books.



As this is a top of the line motherboard from ASUS, there is an abundance of connectivity options. Just like usual, we will go from top to bottom and they are as follows:

1x PS/2 port
2x USB 2.0 ports
1x Optical S/PDIF port
2x USB 3.0 ports
1x CMOS button
1x ROG Connect button
4x USB 2.0 ports, the white one is for ROG Connect
2x USB 3.0 ports
2x eSATA ports
1x Gigabit LAN (Intel NIC)
2x USB 2.0 ports
6x Audio jacks powered by a Supreme-FX X-Fi sound chip

On the graphics card we have:
1x DVI-D port
1x DVI-I
1x HDMI
1x Display Port

A Closer Look (Continued)


The Ultima Scarab is furnished with a plethora of high-quality components which include AMD’s Piledriver FX-8350. OcUK have modified the settings to provide a 4.6GHz overclock which will assist with overall performance and offer a significant benefit over the standard stock settings. This CPU is cooled by one of Corsair’s much respected Hydro Series all-in-one liquid coolers – the Corsair H80i. This type of CPU cooler brings in a number of benefits such as more clearance inside the system for taller memory, lighter than conventional heatsinks, easier to install and lower temperatures when compared to most air coolers.

The ASUS Crosshair V Formula Z 990FX is the cream of the crop in the AMD 990FX motherboard world. Its predecessor, the Crosshair V Formula, is renowned for holding some of the biggest overclocking world records on the AMD platform. We expect this motherboard to be just as good, if not better, which means it will easily cope with whatever you decide to throw at it.

There are plenty of different RAM configurations available today and Overclockers have chosen to go with a Patriot variety – the Viper series in this particular instance. It is a 16GB kit which runs at 1866MHz with CAS10 timings which



The graphics end consists of a Sapphire HD 7970 OC BOOST. This is one of the top-end cards (beginning to see the trend yet?) that have a 7970 core on-board. It runs at 950MHz on the GPU core and boosts to 1000MHz under loaded conditions. Unfortunately, the blue PCB throws off the entire red and black colour scheme that this system has going for itself. We would have expected to see at least a “GHz Edition” card in this system too, being a top-end AMD rig.



Samsung’s 840 series have received positive reviews around the globe, heralding it as one of the best choices for SATA-III SSDs. Samsung claim this drive can deliver up to 530MB/s for sequential read results and 390MB/s for sequential write results. Not only is this drive renowned for its speed but reliability with Samsung SSDs is a particular forte and we are glad that OcUK have chosen this as the boot drive for the system.

Powering Ultima Scarab Crysis is Corsair TX V2 850W power supply. This PSU is a popular choice from the enthusiast series and although it attains a bronze efficiency rating. It features an ultra-silent 120mm cooling fan. TX850W has enough headroom to modify the configuration at a later date.

Test Setup & Benchmarks


The specifications of this system are as follows:

System Specs
CPU AMD Piledriver FX-8350 @4.6GHz
CPU Cooler Corsair H80i
Motherboard ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z 990FX
RAM Patriot Viper 3 “Venom Red” 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-14900C10 1866MHz
GPU Sapphire HD 7970 OC BOOST 3072MB (Crossfire option available)
Solid State Drive(s) Samsung 120GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD (Upgrade options available)
Hard Disk Drive(s) Seagate Barracuda 1TB Storage HDD (Upgrade options available)
Wireless Asus USB-N10 Micro USB Network Adapter Wireless-N 150Mbps
Power Supply Corsair TX V2 850W
Case Cooler Master HAF X
Operating System Windows 7 or 8
Warranty 1 Year


We will be running the following benchmarks to give you a variety of results and to give you a vivid idea of how this system from PC Specialist performs:

AIDA64 – CPU benchmarks
CineBench 11.5 – CPU score
SiSoftware Sandra 2012 – CPU and Memory benchmarks
x264HD Version 4 – 1st and 2nd pass encoding
3DMark 11 – DX11 3D Performance and Extreme preset
Unigine Heaven 3.0 – FPS and Scores
Games – Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinite, Far Cry 3, Sleeping Dogs & Tomb Raider

Power Consumption


First of all, for the idle tests the system is cold booted into Windows and no additional applications are executed – the watts are noted on the external energy monitor we use. Then the system is loaded with Intel Burn Test as well as Furmark to stress the system to the highest possible level – watts are again monitored throughout the period of testing and the highest and lowest rated watts are then noted down. Below are the results of this energy test.





2D Benchmarks: AIDA64


This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example – with HyperThreading disabled – the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs. 31-step long pipeline. The CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.










2D Benchmarks: Cinebench 11.5


CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. This test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor is.





2D Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA 2012


SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but we believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering the CPU and memory tests.












2D Benchmarks: x264HD Version 4 & 5


Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. What’s x264, you ask? It’s more or less the next-generation Xvid/DivX codec. We think it’s ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently




x264 HD Benchmark is a benchmark that allows you to measure how fast your PC can encode a 1080p video clip into a high quality x264 video file. It allows for an easy comparison because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The x264 video encoder has a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make the x264 HD Benchmark an ideal tool in comparing the video encoding performance of different processors and systems.






3D Benchmarks: 3DMark & 3DMark 11


The new 3DMark includes everything you need to benchmark your hardware. With three all new tests you can bench everything from smartphones and tablets to notebooks and desktop PCs. And it’s not just for Windows. With 3DMark you can compare your scores with Android and iOS devices too.








Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance, 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.


3D Benchmarks: Unigine Heaven 4.0


Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.







Gaming Benchmarks: Bioshock Infinite, Crysis 3, & Far Cry 3


Initially conceived as a floating symbol of American ideals at a time when the United States was emerging as a world power, Columbia is sent to distant shores with great fanfare by a captivated public. What begins as a fresh new endeavor of hope turns drastically wrong as the city soon disappears into the clouds to whereabouts unknown. The player takes on the role of former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt, sent to the lost city to rescue Elizabeth, a young lady imprisoned there since her childhood. He develops a relationship with Elizabeth, enhancing his abilities with hers so the pair may escape from a city that is literally falling from the sky. DeWitt has to learn to fight foes in high-speed Sky-Line battles, engage in combat both indoors and amongst the clouds, and harness the power of a myriad of new weapons and abilities.




Players take on the role of Prophet as he returns to New York in 2047, 24 years after the events of Crysis 2. He discovers the city has been encased in a giant Nanodome created by the corrupt CELL corporation. The New York City Liberty Dome is a veritable urban rainforest teeming with overgrown trees, dense swamplands and raging rivers. Within the Liberty Dome, seven distinct and treacherous environments become known as the Seven Wonders. Prophet is said to be on a “revenge mission” after uncovering the truth behind CELL’s motives for building the quarantined Nanodomes. The citizens were told that the giant citywide structures were erected to protect the population and to clean these metropolises of the remains of the Ceph forces. In reality, the Nanodomes are CELL’s covert attempt at land and technology grab in their quest for global domination by means of debt enslavement.




Beyond the limits of civilization lies an island, a lawless place ruled by piracy and human misery, where your only escapes are drugs or the muzzle of a gun. This is where you find yourself, trapped in a place that’s forgotten right from wrong, a place that lives by the principles of violence. In Far Cry 3, players step into the shoes of Jason Brody, stranded on this mysterious tropical island. You dictate how the story unfolds, from the battles you choose to fight down to the allies or enemies you make along the way. Slash, sneak, detonate and shoot your way across the island in a world that has lost all sense of right and wrong. Beware the beauty and mystery of this unexplored paradise and live to outwit its roster of ruthless, desperate characters. You’ll need more than luck to survive.



Gaming Benchmarks: Sleeping Dogs & Tomb Raider


Inspired by classic Hollywood and Asian cinema style action thrillers, Sleeping Dogs is a gritty open-world cop drama set in the vibrant city of Hong Kong. Sleeping Dogs catapults players into the role of undercover cop Wei Shen, tasked with taking down one of the world’s most fearsome criminal organizations from the inside… the Hong Kong Triads. As players explore the bustling and crowded Hong Kong Island, through its neon-lit side streets and sprawling street markets, an incredible story unfolds of loyalty and betrayal where Wei begins to question his own motives as he is sucked in deeper than he could ever imagine.




Lara Croft, one of video game’s most iconic heroines and adventurer, is back in an all-new tale by developer Crystal Dynamics, titled Tomb Raider. This game visits a period of the franchise previous unexplored – specifically, Lara’s days before she became a hard bitten treasure hunter and “tomb raider”.




Conclusion


After having a play around with the Ultima Scarab Crysis from Overclockers, we can give you our verdict on the systems performance. Looks are definitely an important factor when it comes to building high-end computers these days and it is nice to see that the colour schemes are well coordinated and tie into an AMD red and black arrangement. It was an all-round pleasant experience for the majority of the time we had with it but there were a few downsides which we will detail below.

Staying on the positive side of the fence for now, we were impressed with the component choice within this system. It features the top-end components from AMD and as said in the introduction, there is no exception. The ASUS Crosshair V Formula Z is one of the best (if not the best) AMD 990FX motherboards available to date. It is absolutely loaded with features and being a top overclocking board, you can be sure that it will handle whatever you throw at it. If you’re the adventurous type and wish to push the overclock harder, you can do it knowing that the motherboard will be able to cope.

The FX-8350 is the best desktop CPU currently available from the AMD camp. It runs at 4GHz at stock with a 4.2GHz turbo boost but OcUK have overclocked it so that it runs at 4.6GHz all of the time. The cooler used for this system is the Corsair H80i which is where a little negativity comes in, and here’s why… Whilst the cooler does keep the CPU cool enough to run at these speeds, it unfortunately creates a lot of noise due to the stock fans being installed. They definitely do shift a lot of air whilst they are at full speed but the noise may be unbearable for some and a quieter option could be more desirable. The machine is audible whilst it is idling, which could be prevented if different fans were utilised on the H80i.



The only part in this system which does not match the red and black colour scheme is the graphics card with its blue PCB. We also expected a ‘GHz Edition’ card to be installed but alas, it was not to be. Having said that, the Sapphire HD7970 OC BOOST is still a fantastic card and is extremely quiet in idle situations and it remains very quiet under loaded conditions too, even when it is being stressed by Furmark which stresses the GPU to within an inch of its life. Just to find out how loud it is with the fan at 100 percent, we used MSI Afterburner to put the fan speed to the max and even then it was not audible over the H80i fans.

Touching on the storage solution of this system now and we are glad to see a Samsung 840 120GB installed which can be upgraded/changed if you wish. It is a drive which screams quality and is blisteringly quick too. The secondary storage is provided by a 1TB hard drive (again, it can be upgraded/changed) which is not a bad starting point but we feel that a 2TB hard drive may more more useful as it is a gaming rig. Although it is a starting point and certainly should keep you going for a while before you fill it up with your games library.

Finally we come to the power consumption of this system. Being an AMD CPU, we know that they use more electricity than their Intel counterparts for example but there isn’t a lot that we can change about that. Using around 530w is a substantial amount of power considering it only has a single GPU installed, but it isn’t completely ridiculous either considering that the 7970 can pull close to half of that on its own.

Overall, we feel that this system boasts high quality components and it is well put together. The cable management is great, just like every other OcUK rig we have looked at in the past. Due to the noise and the non ‘GHz Edition’ GPU, we feel that it is worthy of our Silver award. The system is rock solid and we have no negative comments to make about it. If it were a quieter system and it utilised a ‘GHz Edition’ GPU, it would most likely have creeped into the golden region of our awards. We here at Vortez understand that noise is subjective and it varies greatly as to what someone may perceive as ‘too noisy’, but it is too noisy for our liking to be called quiet. Other than that minor complaint, top work OcUK!

Pros
+ High-end components
+ Stable overclock
+ Great cable management

Cons
– The H80i is noisy
– Not a ‘GHz Edition’ GPU
– Uses a lot of power


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