With Intel Haswell fresh onto the market, we take a look at one of OcUK’s new full systems featuring AMD HD7950
Product on Review: OcUK Titan Scythe
Manufacturer and Sponsor: Overclockers UK
Street price: £1072.06 inc. VAT (At time of review)
With the recent release of Intel’s 4th Generation Core CPU’s AKA Haswell, and 8-series motherboard chipsets to accompany this new range of CPUs, many system integrators are quickly jumping onto the bandwagon and releasing their own range of pre-built systems based on this architecture. OcUK are one such company quickly getting into the game and releasing a range of pre-built PC systems to suite varied budgets and cater for customers needs.
Today we will be looking at the OcUK Titan Scythe pre-built PC based around an overclocked i5 CPU, Z87 motherboard backed up by 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a fast ATI HD7950 GFX card, SSD + HDD storage and all wrapped up in a quality NZXT Phantom 410 case.
This system has been designed to meet the requirements of modern games while keeping the price low without sacrificing the quality of the parts supplied and comes with a preset overclock and 24 month warranty for piece of mind.
Overclockers UK on their Titan Scythe
Introducing the “Titan 445i Scythe” based on the very latest cutting edge Intel Haswell architecture. Equipped with an Intel Core i5 4670K 3.40GHz overclocked to a blistering 4.40GHz, powerful quad core performance combined with the mighty all new Intel Z87 chipset. A huge 8GB of Kingston Genesis DDR3 RAM runs at a swift 1866MHZ, delivering blindingly quick multitasking performance. Equipped with a formidable overclock and paired with speedy memory, the “Titan 445i Scythe” has razor sharp graphics capable of slicing through the toughest games and demanding applications.
System Specifications
The System consists of the following components:CPU Intel Core i5-4670K@4.4GHz
CPU Cooler Akasa Nero 3 V2
Motherboard Gigabyte Z87-D3HP
RAM Patriot Viper “Black Mamba” Generation 3 8GB 1866MHz
GPU HIS HD 7950 IceQ BOOST 3072MB GDDR5
Solid State Drive Samsung 120GB SSD 840 SATA 6Gb/s Basic
Hard Disk Drive Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache
Optical Drive OcUK 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter
Power Supply Corsair 2013 Edition Gamer Series GS 600W
Case NZXT Phantom 410 Enthusiast Midi Tower Case – Gun Metal
OS A choice of Windows 7 or 8 versions
Warranty 24 Months Collect and Return
CPU Cooler Akasa Nero 3 V2
Motherboard Gigabyte Z87-D3HP
RAM Patriot Viper “Black Mamba” Generation 3 8GB 1866MHz
GPU HIS HD 7950 IceQ BOOST 3072MB GDDR5
Solid State Drive Samsung 120GB SSD 840 SATA 6Gb/s Basic
Hard Disk Drive Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache
Optical Drive OcUK 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter
Power Supply Corsair 2013 Edition Gamer Series GS 600W
Case NZXT Phantom 410 Enthusiast Midi Tower Case – Gun Metal
OS A choice of Windows 7 or 8 versions
Warranty 24 Months Collect and Return
Packaging
The system arrived with us in the cases original box and packaging, but this was then placed inside an even bigger and stronger cardboard box and an excellent amount of internal packaging including air bags, soft cell foam inserts and more cardboard to fill the space up between the two boxes.Your system will arrive in the same manner.
This excellent packaging ensured the system arrived in pristine condition apart from the CPU cooler fan which was lose as it is held into posistion by four rubber pins.
This we are sure is caused by courier handling and would not have left OcUK in this condition.
It is easy to insert the rubber pins back into the coolers stack, but it is well worth checking a systems RAM and GFX card and other parts over before use.
A Closer Look
Looking at the outside of the system shows a good collection of connectivity provided by the NZXT Phantom 410 case which is finished in Gun Metal Grey.
The front I/O consists of,
• Two USB3.0 ports
• Two USB2.0 ports
• Microphone and headphone port
• 3 speed fan controller
• Power and Reset buttons.
• Two USB2.0 ports
• Microphone and headphone port
• 3 speed fan controller
• Power and Reset buttons.
When the system is powered ON there is a white LED strip just beneath the power button and above this a smaller HDD activity light.
The 3 speed fan controller is of the single channel variety and so controls all three included case fans together.
The case has a latched door which hides the 5.25” drive bays and the OcUK DVD rewriter which is actually a Samsung model.
The rear of the system has plenty of ports for you, these consisting of.
• PS/2
• Two USB2.0
• Six USB3.0
• Ethernet
• 7.1 channel sound including optical S/PDIF out
• DVI, Dsub and DMI from the motherboard
• DVI, 1x HDMI & 2x Mini-DisplayPort from the GFX card
• Two USB2.0
• Six USB3.0
• Ethernet
• 7.1 channel sound including optical S/PDIF out
• DVI, Dsub and DMI from the motherboard
• DVI, 1x HDMI & 2x Mini-DisplayPort from the GFX card
A Closer Look Continued.
Removing the cases left side panel reveals a good attempt at routing the system data and power cables in such a way as to make it easy to slide the side panel on and off, the cables are well secured out of the way.If you do need to use any of the spare connectors it is easy to get them lose.
Removing the cases side panel reveals the guts of the system, cable managment is extremely tidy indeed with great care taken to use as many of the grommetted cable mangament holes as possible to route the cables in the neatest way possible, we are extremely impresed by the care taken to do this this right.
The choice of components is excellent, built around the Intel Haswell i5 4670K CPU running at 4.4GHz when required and still downclocking it self when not.
Gigabyte is the choice of motherboard with a Z87-D3HP motherboard which looks fantastic with its matt black PCB and surface mounted parts at the heart of the system. A unique feature of Gigabyte motherboards is DualBIOS which is a safety feature that provides a backup BIOS chip should the main chip falter
The innards are dominated by the HIS HD7950 Boost GFX card with its IceQ cooler which exhausts hot air directly out of the rear of the case helping to keep the internal temperatures down. This card has a core clock of 850MHz and a boost clock of 925MHz Boost, the GDDR5 3GB memory on this card also runs at a fast speed of 5Ghz help this system to achieve good frame rates in games while keeping the in game settings at their highest.
The Akasa Nero3 CPU cooler is an extremely quiet cooler and this reviewer could not hear it at all while using the system on a daily basis.
The Corsair GS600 PSU is another quality component and has a hybrid fan control that keeps the fan stationary when the system is not stressed, this helps also promote the systems quiet operation.
8GB of Patriot RAM running at 1866MHz with tight timings is provided for the system to feed upon.
The storage setup consists of a Samsung 840 basic SSD which runs the OS and has enough free space left over to install a useful amount of games and applications.
A Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM Hard Disk Drive accompanies the SSD as a general storage drive for the rest of your programs and data.
Overall the OcUK Titan Scythe has a great choice of parts all designed to make the most out of a well thought out and designed system.
A Closer Look Continued 2
The Phantom 410 case has a white LED illuminated top mounted 140mm fan and this helps provide a sophisticated glow to the top half of the components. The Corsair GS600 PSU has a blue illuminated fan which illuminates the lower half of the system, this blue illumination can be switched ON or OFF via a button on the rear of the PSU itself.
One gripe this reviewer does have is with the blue PCB of the HIS 7950 GFX card itself, this looks a bit out of place against the black motherboard and surrounding components such as the Patriot Black Mamba RAM, a Black PCB GFX card would have looked spot on, especially as the Phantom 410 case has a window to display the goods inside.
Lastly the HIS 7950 GFX card has a bit of sag to it in its slot probably caused by the overall weight and heft of the IceQ cooling solution.
Maybe routing the power cables to the card above the top of the PCB would help?
Test Setup and Benchmarks.
The System specifications are:CPU Intel Core i5-4670K@4.4GHz
CPU Cooler Akasa Nero 3 V2
Motherboard Gigabyte Z87-D3HP
RAM Patriot Viper “Black Mamba” Generation 3 8GB 1866MHz
GPU HIS HD 7950 IceQ BOOST 3072MB GDDR5
Solid State Drive Samsung 120GB SSD 840 SATA 6Gb/s Basic
Hard Disk Drive Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache
Optical Drive OcUK 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter
Power Supply Corsair 2013 Edition Gamer Series GS 600W
Case NZXT Phantom 410 Enthusiast Midi Tower Case – Gun Metal
OS A choice of Windows 7 or 8 versions
Warranty 24 Months Collect and Return
CPU Cooler Akasa Nero 3 V2
Motherboard Gigabyte Z87-D3HP
RAM Patriot Viper “Black Mamba” Generation 3 8GB 1866MHz
GPU HIS HD 7950 IceQ BOOST 3072MB GDDR5
Solid State Drive Samsung 120GB SSD 840 SATA 6Gb/s Basic
Hard Disk Drive Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache
Optical Drive OcUK 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter
Power Supply Corsair 2013 Edition Gamer Series GS 600W
Case NZXT Phantom 410 Enthusiast Midi Tower Case – Gun Metal
OS A choice of Windows 7 or 8 versions
Warranty 24 Months Collect and Return
The following synthetic benchmarks and game benchmarks were run to to give an overall impression of how the Titan Scythe will cope with what you throw at it.
AIDA64 – CPU benchmarks
CineBench 11.5 – CPU benchmarks
X264 FHD – FPS
3DMark – Ice Storm, Cloud Gate and Firestrike total scores
PCmark07 – Combined score
Unigine Heaven 4.0 – FPS and score
Games – Hitamn Absolution, Bioshock Infinite, TombRaider AVG FPS
CineBench 11.5 – CPU benchmarks
X264 FHD – FPS
3DMark – Ice Storm, Cloud Gate and Firestrike total scores
PCmark07 – Combined score
Unigine Heaven 4.0 – FPS and score
Games – Hitamn Absolution, Bioshock Infinite, TombRaider AVG FPS
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: X264 FHD
x264 is a free software library for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. x264 is
extraordinarily fast with over 15000 lines of assembly code and highly optimized
algorithms. In terms of quality for general-purpose encoding x264 outperforms every
other video encoder on the market. x264 is commonly used by companies ranging from
Youtube, Facebook to Hulu and Avail Media.
This application will test how fast your CPU is able to encode test sequence
(SVT_1080p50.mkv) using default x264 settings.
format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. x264 is
extraordinarily fast with over 15000 lines of assembly code and highly optimized
algorithms. In terms of quality for general-purpose encoding x264 outperforms every
other video encoder on the market. x264 is commonly used by companies ranging from
Youtube, Facebook to Hulu and Avail Media.
This application will test how fast your CPU is able to encode test sequence
(SVT_1080p50.mkv) using default x264 settings.
2D Benchmarks: PCMark 07
PCMark 8 combines performance benchmarking with battery life measurement and includes tests based on popular Adobe and Microsoft applications. Whether you are looking for long battery life, or maximum power, PCMark 8 will help you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for your needs. PCMark 8 is the complete PC performance benchmark for home and business.
3D Benchmarks: 3DMark
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.
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: Hitman Absolution, Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite
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.
Tomb Raider is set on Yamatai, an island from which Lara Croft must save her friends and escape, while being hunted down by a malevolent cult. Gameplay elements focus more on survival, although exploration is used within the game when exploring the island and various optional tombs.
Hitman: Absolution follows Agent 47, a cold-blooded assassin, who takes on his most dangerous contract to date. Betrayed by those he once trusted — and now hunted by the police — he suddenly finds himself at the center of a dark conspiracy and must embark on a personal journey through a corrupt and twisted world. Boasting a cinematic story, distinctive art direction and highly original game design, Hitman: Absolution combines much-loved classic gameplay with features never seen before in the Hitman franchise.
Benchmarks: AS SSD & Windows Boot
The AS SSD Benchmark determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains six synthetic and three copy tests. , the synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are carried out without using the operating system cache. In Seq-test the program measures how long it takes to read a 1 GB file to write respectively. 4K test the reading and writing performance in random 4K blocks is determined. The 4K-64-thrd test corresponds to the 4K procedure except that the read and write operations are spread across 64 threads. This test should represent SSDs with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) differences between the IDE operation mode where NCQ is not supported, and the AHCI mode. The additional compression test can measure the power of the SSD in response to the data compressibility. This is especially for the controllers that use to increase the performance and life of the cell compression is important. During the first three synthetic tests and the compression test, the size of the test file is 1 GB. Finally, the access time of the SSD is still under investigation, the access to read the entire capacity of the SSD (Full Stroke) is determined. The write access test, however, is done with a 1 GB big test file.
A strong showing from the Samsung 840 SSD, the write speeds are less than other drives on the market but these figures are less important for gaming where reads play a bigger factor in overall performance.
The OcUK Titan Scythe booted into Windows 8 in a very quick time of 18 seconds, this really impressed us but we found that in the UEFI a new feature called Quick Boot was disabled. This feature has two settings (Quick and ultra fast), with Ultra fast now enabled the boot time dropped to 15.5 seconds which is very good indeed.
Moving onto CPU temperatures we ran the AIDA64 Stability test for 20 minutes and used CoreTemp to record the CPU cores highest values. The core temperature values were 63C, 67C, 66C, 61C, this gives an average of 64.25C, the ambient air temperature was 22.3C giving us a Delta temperature of 41.95C.
These temperatures are very good indeed and were recorded with the cases fan controller at its medium setting so you ultimately have a cool and quiet running CPU.
Conclusion
After using the OcUK Titan Scythe for two weeks and living with it day to day we can report that this system is up to the tasks it is designed for, gaming.Starting with the looks of the system we are happy to see such a nice case as the NZXT Phantom 410 finished in a fetching Gun Metal Grey with a good paint finish that matches the plastic parts that make up the fascia and top panels. The way OcUK has done such a great job on hiding the unused cables and making a neat job of cable routing within the case is lovely.
Speed is key indeed and with a solid motherboard choice in the Gigabyte Z87-D3HP with its new UEFI BIOS that is a joy to use, Intel i5 4670K which has been overclocked to 4.4GHz via Turbo ratios so it still down clocks and voltage drops when you do not need the full speed thus saving power and heat, 8GB of fast 1866Mhz DDR3 RAM that matches the black PCB of the motherboard, HIS HD7950 GFX card, fast and reliable Samsung 840 SSD. this system is indeed ready for current and future gaming at very high if not maximum settings at a resolution of 1080P.
To improve the system’s aesthetics we would have liked to have seen a black PCB GFX card too. This combined with the cases side panel window and fan illumination would have been a perfect finishing touch.
Noise is a big factor and while gaming or day to day use this system was overall very quiet indeed. We did however notice an infrequent and ever so faint coil whine was coming from the GFX card, maybe its just this sample and not all are affected?
Next we come to the system price, the OcUK Titan Scythe is (at the time of review) £1072.06 which includes delivery and also a fantastic 24 month collect and return warranty. Now, many people have argued that building your own system is cheaper, but not in the case of this one, we have manually selected all the individual components and OS that go to make up this PC at OcUK and discovered that the total price including VAT and delivery is £1074.23, so £2.17 more expensive!!! Considering the Titan Scythe comes to you built, overclocked and with a warranty this is exceptional value for money and for this we award it the Vortez Amazing Value Award.
Going back to the storage system, it was nice to see as well as the 120GB SSD OcUk have also used a large 2TB 7200RPM HDD to store your music, photos, games and applications. This is a good component selection which will last some time before being used up.
Overall we are impressed by the speed, build quality, price, warranty and overall quietness of the Titan Scythe,so for that we award it the Vortez Silver Award. If OcUK could use a black PCB GFX card such as the MSI HD7950 Twin Frozr III Boost Edition which may also have reduced coil whine, then we would have awarded it the Gold Award.
Pros
+ Component choice
+ System cost and warranty
+ Great cable management
Cons
– Coil whine sometimes
– Blue PCB GPU
+ Component choice
+ System cost and warranty
+ Great cable management
Cons
– Coil whine sometimes
– Blue PCB GPU
Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.
