Final thoughts, rating, awards
Wired2Fire is looking to tempt users who want to purchase a capable gaming machine from a system integrator rather than build it themselves. The AMD Phenom II-powered Velocity XFire and Core i7- totin' Hellspawn XFire are cases in point, costing just over £1,000 for the base units that are differentiated via, in the main, choices for CPU, memory and motherboard.Starting off with the excellent Cooler Master HAF 932 chassis in both instances build quality and cabling is good. We'd like a little more attention paid to the specification of a larger hard-drive, future expansion capabilities and optimisations to the BIOSes, but that's pretty much our gripes down and dusted.
The choice of components is decent enough, save for the storage, and we'd look on the AMD-based Velocity with kinder eyes if it weren't for the comparable Hellspawn, which ships with a £120 premium that's more than offset by a much-faster subsystem, as shown by our value metric on the previous page.
Consummate gaming performers in both cases, the two pre-overclocked systems provide reasonable value for money when evaluated against the competition, such as Scan's 3XS Dragon or Dell's XPS 630.
Making a choice out of the two, the Core i7 Hellspawn is faster and more versatile, opening up the path to NVIDIA multi-GPU graphics, if that's the user's wont in the future. A fast system that's chock-full of big-name components, it needs only a touch of tweaking - 6GB DDR3 and 1TB hard drive - to go from good to excellent.
Bottom line: two good systems that show intelligent component choices and handy gaming performance. The HEXUS nod goes to the Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire.
Pros
Tasty overclock on both systems
Solid performance from big-name components
Reasonable value-for-money on both fronts
Decent upgrade potential deriving from the chassis
Cons
No card-reader
Cable provision for upgrading should have been better thought-out
500GB hard drive doesn't cut it in the £1,000-plus base-unit arena
HEXUS Rating
HEXUS.net scores products out of 100%, taking into account technology, implementation, stability, performance, value, customer care and desirability. A score for an average-rated product is a meaningful ‘50%’, and not ‘90%’, which is common practice for a great many other publications.
We consider any product score above '50%' as a safe buy. The higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy. Simple, straightforward buying advice.
The rating is given in relation to the category the component competes in, therefore the systems are evaluated with respect to our 'high-end' criteria.
Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire system (Intel Core i7)
Wired2Fire Velocity XFire system (AMD Phenom II)
HEXUS Awards
Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire system (Intel Core i7)
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire is currently available from £1,229, including VAT and delivery. Click here for the configuration URL.The Wired2Fire Velocity XFire is currently available from £1,109, including VAT and delivery. Click here for the configuration URL.
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.
Peter George, co-founder of Wired2Fire, was kind enough to submit a detailed HEXUS Right2Reply. We urge you to read it on the following page.