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If you’re after subtlety and modest pricing, Eclipse’s Stealth FX812R795 Extreme is not for you. From its pillar-box red case to its triple bank of 3D monitors and military-style Thrustmaster joystick – listed separately on Eclipse’s website as the Eclipse Stealth Flight Pack – the Stealth is built to be noticed.
The system’s key audience is flight sim enthusiasts, although we don’t think any gamers would be unhappy with this rig. Some assembly is required, as you have to start by attaching the monitors to an armature that allows you to pivot them for the perfect three-screen viewing angle. We’d have liked the manual for assembling the triple-screen armature to have been a little more idiot-proof, with more expanded diagrams of the how the screen mounts are clipped on to the main frame, but we got everything together and correctly positioned with a little trial and error. All three monitors come with DVI leads and a DisplayPort to DVI adapter is supplied in the box, so you can use the three screens in Eyefinity mode.
The 23in LG D2342 3D displays come with passive 3D glasses. They’re not going to win any awards for raw quality – their matte screens don’t oversaturate colours, but they’re somewhat prone to suffering from a slight yellow or magenta cast. However, switching the screens to 3D mode eliminated the casts, as well as ramped up the brightness – turning on 3D involved some fiddling with the unlabelled monitor control buttons but isn’t too tricky. The quality of the monitors’ passive 3D is surprisingly good, although it’s very dependent on viewing angle. The issue with viewing angles isn’t a problem if you’re using the system for gaming, as the monitor stand allows you to precisely adjust the angle of each display, but could present problems if you want to watch a 3D film on one of the monitors with friends.
The system comes installed with a 3D gaming launcher and a copy of Microsoft Flight to go with your massively over-the-top Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog flight stick and throttle array. We had to set up our monitors for AMD Eyefinity before we could play in full-screen 3D, but with that done, Flight automatically detected and expanded to fill our monitors. You can also add more games to the 3D launcher, which has built in 3D profiles for a wide range of popular titles – more can be found online via regular updates to the TriDef 3D software.
As well as playing in 3D, we ran our usual 2D 1,920×1,080 gaming tests, which produced astonishing frame rates – 86.4fps in Dirt 3 at Ultra detail and with 4x anti-aliasing, and 43.3fps in Crysis 2 at Ultra detail. We also ran the Dirt 3 test at the PC’s full Eyefinity triple-screen resolution of 5,760×1,080 and got a smooth frame rate of 55.6fps. Even when playing Dirt 3 in 3D at 5,760×1,080 we still saw a playable frame rate of 37.8fps. All that performance is hardly surprising given that the Stealth’s graphics are powered by two hugely powerful AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics cards with 3GB of RAM each in a CrossFire configuration.
The PC’s water-cooled processor is an eight-core “Bulldozer” AMD FX-8120, overclocked to 4.51GHz. Even with this huge overclock it still scored 100 overall in our benchmarks, which is the same as an Intel Core i5-2500K running at its stock speed. It’s more than quick enough to run intensive applications and games, but, as noted in our review of the similarly eight-core FX-8150 most current applications don’t take advantage of so many cores so much of the chip’s potential is wasted. This may change in the future as applications become more six- and eight-core friendly.
All the system’s components, including the 1000W PSU, are high-quality branded hardware from manufacturers such as Corsair and XFS. The motherboard is Asus’s Sabertooth 990FX, which has four PCI-E x16 slots, a PCI slot and a PCI-E x1 slot. However, all the expansion card slots are blocked by the pair of graphics cards – if you want to add a sound card, for instance, you’ll have to stick with USB. All four memory card slots are also occupied – the PC has a total of 16GB of memory. Only three of the motherboard’s eight SATA ports – two SATA2 and six SATA3 – are in use, though, and there are plenty of vacant bays in the massive case.
The three occupied bays are taken up by a 120GB SSD for the Windows system disk, 1TB hard disk for data and a Blu-ray re-writer. The top of the case has an additional SATA bay, making it easy to hot-plug hard disks to get at their data. Next to this are USB2, USB3 and eSATA ports. At the back of the case are another dozen USB ports, two of them USB3, as well as eSATA, Firewire and a PS/2 port. There’s also an optical S/PDIF output and 7.1 analogue surround sound outputs.
The PC’s Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog flight kit is an enormous metal throttle and flight stick set, accurately modelled on controls used by the US Air Force. They lack the paddles required to make the most of some commercial aircraft sims and their driver is a touch fiddly to configure, but these heavy-duty controls make you feel like you’re really busting tanks. The Cyborg R.A.T.3 and V.5 keyboard are a decent gaming set, although we found the mouse a little small and the keys a tad spongy.
If you’re after the ultimate multi-screen, 3D flight sim rig, this is probably it. Its few flaws are minor, it’s massively powerful and it’s been built with a great amount of care. For those chosen few who have both the money and the will to spend over £3000 on a gaming system, this is a brilliant option. If you don’t fancy triple-monitor gaming and aren’t into flight sims, you can buy the hugely-powerful base unit for £2,000 inc VAT.
