Hellspawn XFire: inside
A peek inside shows the Gigabyte board's socket orientation is 90° further anit-clockwise than the AMD box. Cabling, again, is good, but the same 'pre-plumbing' caveats apply here. Ignore the 700W PSU here; retail samples ship with the 850W model as on the AMD system.
Intel's Core i7 920 ships with a default frequency of 2.67GHz compared to the Phenom II 940's 3.0GHz. Both are overclocked to 3.6GHz, so common sense tells us the percentage increase is higher in this case - almost 35 per cent.
We already know that the Core i7 is faster than the Phenom II on a clock-for-clock basis when evaluated on a wide variety of benchmarks, and we'll quantify by how much in the upcoming benchmark section.
Core i7 works best when run off a tri-channel memory setup, hence the three Corsair DDR3 DIMMS which were set to 1,440MHz with 9-9-9-24 1T timings.
3GBs will be enough for most tasks, but the steadily-dropping nature of DDR3 makes the ~£50 cost of purchasing an extra 3GB from the likes of Crucial a good move.
Other than the guts of the system, the Hellspawn XFire ships with practically the same components as the Velocity, so, please, head back to the previous pages for the list of HEXUS-identified foibles such as a lack of card-reader. However, the Hellspawn completed an 11-hour burn-in test without issue
Priced at £1,229, including VAT and delivery - a £120 premium over the AMD Velocity - the Hellspawn would cost around an additional £120 to build over the AMD box - the CPU and motherboard taking the bulk of the extra components' charge. Therefore, the base unit represents reasonable-to-good value once the warranty and overclock have been taken into account, too.