Eclipse Titan Crossfire i795R489 review

Eclipse’s Titan has all the power you’d expect from a Core i7 PC. It did well in all our tests, topping the Call of Duty 4 and Crysis charts. There’s plenty of room for upgrades on the Asrock X58 Deluxe motherboard. The 6GB of RAM in three slots can be upgraded to a maximum of 24GB. The 1TB hard disk should take a while to fill, and five empty 3?in bays mean that you can always add more. The front of the PC includes a memory card reader, plus three convenient USB ports. There are six more at the back, along with a single eSATA port. Inside, there are four PCI-E x16 slots and three PCI slots, but one of these is blocked by the double-height Radeon HD 4890 graphics card. The motherboard supports both CrossFire and SLI, so you can install up to four matching ATI or Nvidia graphics cards. With the great performance of the 4890, there’s little reason to do this, but we strongly recommend adding some extra case fans if you do, as cooling is barely adequate as it is. The case gets warm when the PC is running. This isn’t helped by the small CPU cooler and lack of a rear fan. Despite this, the Titan is noisy, with a persistent hum that the case does little to insulate against. The system, just like Eclipse’s other PCs in this Labs, draws an unusually large amount of power when idle. Our power meter showed that it consumed 189W, which rose to 369W when the processor was under a heavy load.

The 24in widescreen BenQ G2410HD monitor isn’t outstanding – the newer G2420HD is better – but it’s gratifying large. It’s good for movies and gaming, despite slightly uneven backlighting and fairly muted colours. Despite the price, Eclipse bundles a Microsoft Basic wired keyboard and optical mouse set. We’d have expected something more upmarket with a top-end PC, and it’s small details such as this and the case’s high temperature and minimal cooling that make the Titan look like a poor choice when compared to Scan’s 3XS or Mesh’s Slayer Xtreme Gamer.