Review: Scan 3XS Vengeance RTX

Conclusion

GeForce RTX 3080 ushers in a new era of high-end PC gaming. Nvidia's 8,704-core Ampere GPU raises the performance bar to new heights and does so at an affordable £649 price point that has taken enthusiasts by surprise.

Base units equipped with such firepower needn't break the bank, and with the proliferation of many-core CPUs and ultra-fast PCIe 4.0 SSDs, there's more than one reason to contemplate a new gaming PC.

Tapping into these key attractions, Scan's 3XS Vengeance RTX touts an eight-core Ryzen processor, 1TB of PCIe 4.0 storage and benchmark-setting GeForce RTX 3080 graphics in a £2,100 rig that's powerful, sleek and backed by a three-year warranty as standard.

The essentials are all there, yet you really need to be gaming at a 4K UHD resolution to let the hardware stretch its legs. Those contemplating an in-place upgrade to RTX 3080 should take note: as powerful as the GPU is, it craves a high-end CPU to perform at its best at all times.

Bottom line: Scan's 3XS Vengeance RTX is a fine introduction to RTX 3080 base units, but a faster CPU would help it top the charts at every resolution.

Scan 3XS Vengeance RTX

HEXUS.where2buy

The 3XS Vengeance RTX base unit is available to pre-order from Scan Computers.

HEXUS.right2reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

James Gorbold, Technical Marketing & Solution Architect at Scan Computers, issued the following right2reply:

Thanks to HEXUS for the amazing review of our latest 3XS System.

With more and more games, including big hitters such as Fortnite, Minecraft, Call of Duty and Cyberpunk 2077, embracing ray tracing and DLSS greater emphasis is being moved from the CPU to the GPU.
When developing this system we tested a variety of hardware configurations and found that in such games, the CPU choice barely has any impact on performance across a variety of resolutions such as 1080p, 1440p and 4K. For instance we measured no performance increase when stepping up from the 3700X used in this system to the 3800X.

We do recognise that some customers will want a higher performance CPU to run CPU-limited applications and games, and we do offer RTX 3080 systems in a wide variety of configurations.