And in the Asus corner...

The battle between Asus and Gigabyte has traditionally been a heavyweight contest, though in recent years it's become more or a ritualised beating, as the Asus boards have consistently out-punched Gigabyte at every level. With the release of Intel's Ivy Bridge setup and Z77 platform, however, Gigabyte has made a dramatic return form.

Now the head-to-head is once more a battle of the giants, and nowhere more so than between the two premium Z77 motherboards we're checking out this issue.

They are both around the $400 mark - fortune compared to most of the fairy resonable Z77 boards tested - and come with more ringing and whistly things than you could shake a thin piece of dead tree at. They also both come with connections for the new Intel/Apple love child, Thunderbolt.

Lightning Thunder

Where the Gigabyte board has a pair of connections for the new interface, this Premium effort from the Asus has just a single port on the rear. Still, it shouldn't have trouble rocking triple-screen configurations, with HDMI and fully Displayport connectors alongside that Thunderbolt socket.

The Asus board also seem happier running Thunderbolt, as it managed faster data transfer benchmarks is storage tests. Used a pair of Intel's SSD 330 drives in a RAID O array to make best use of the available bandwidth. In both the maximum read-write and sequential read/write tests, the Asus board posted faster results - but not by much. On the 4K random test though, which is more of an indicaiton of general Windows responsiveness, the Asus board's write speed is 14MB/s higher. That's a big difference in 4K random terms.

Sadly for the Asus board, its usual dominance of gaming benchmarks has been undone by the superior performance of the top-end Gigabyte Z77. It was similar situation with the Gigabyte Z77-UD5H, and show just how much the opposition has caught up.

Usual service is resumed with regards to overlcocking though, as this board gave a solid 4.85GHz clock speed on i7-3770K. That's only a shade quicker than the Gigabyte's 4.79GHz, but still makes a difference.

Another trick the Asus mobo has up its silicon sleeve is the volume of PCIe 3.0 slots. With four full x16 connections, this board will happily rock the four-way SLI world. Sure, it'll get cramped with four GPUs, but you're only going to be covering the power and reset buttons with the fourth card, and with your chassis closed that makes no difference at all.

It comes with a 32GB mSATA SSD too, allowing you to pair up a traditional hard drive with the speedier SSD to give it a boost. The Gigabyte board has the same slot, but doesn't ship with flash memory for the Smart Response lovin'.

It's a tough call between these Asus and Gigabyte boards. The Asus has a little more in the feature set, but the Gigabyte has excellent gaming performance chops. For the money the Asus is probably better value, but it's a close run thing.

Technical analysis

It's a real ding-dong battle between this and the Gigabyte motherboard, and for much of it you'd have to favor the Asus offering with its faster Thunderbolt speeds and higher overclock. The Gigabyte has the edge in gaming performance though, so there isn't clear overall winner

Video encoding performance

4K random Thunderbolt performance

Maximum overclock

As reference as you're likely to get

Pricing is such an important part of the graphics card war, the mere $32 separating the Asus and EVGA cards actually means a hell of a lot. When you're operating in such a saturated segment every penny counts. Like the Asus card, this Superclocked EVGA GTX 660 Ti is factory overclocked, but because of its policy of cherry-picking GPUs and leaving the reference cooling in place, the EVGA isn't clocked as high.

The card will still regularly top the 1GHz mark in-game, but the extra 65MHz at the base isn't really going to set the gaming world alight. And so it proves in benchmarks, with the EVGA resolutely coming in behind all the other GTX 660 Ti cards we've seen so far.

That's exactly what you would expect against the more expensive card from Asus, but there are also the Gigabyte and Zotac-shaped thorns in the EVGA card's side. Both cards are practically the same price as the EVGA, but come with higher base clocks among other things.

This also means that it sits behind the similarly priced vanilla AMD HD 7950 in most of tests - even more so if you bring the latest HD 7950 with Boost into the equation, with its own raised clock speeds. Things are pretty close in terms of regular gaming, but when you look at the more compute-focused titles the gap starts to look covernous.

Where EVGA stands out though is in its excellent support setup and the option to pick up a 10-year warranty for your new GPU. Still, it's the slowest of the current crop and can't make up for that deficit by being a few dollar cheaper.

The Chillblast machine is one big, fat bestie. The chunky Zalman chassis gives it a real sense of presence on your desk, and the internal goodies match that sense of scale, with a heftily overclocked i5 CPU and similarly overclocked GTX 670 going the graphical grunt work.

Sadly though, it's in the overclocking department that the Chillblast Fusion Thunderbird gets a serious black mark. The Core i5 3570K gets a headline-grabbing 4.8GHz clockspeed - easily the highest clocked chip in the test. If it ran solidly at that speed, we'd be all over this rig like a cheap LED strip. Unfortunately, while it boots happily with these settings and will allow you to navigate around Windows with impunity, as soon as you start stressing the chip it begins to throw a wobbly. We couldn't run through either Cinebench or X264 encoding tests without it crashing.

All it took was a quick trip to BIOS land, knocking the multiplier down a notch, to hit a rock-solid 4.7GHz. If the CPU couldn't run under load at that clockspeed, the rig shouldn't have arrived with those settings. It's a shame, because we've only had good experiences with Chillblast machines in the past, but if you've just spent $1k+ on a machine, the last thing you want it to do is fail under load.

That aside, things are decidedly rosy for the Chillblast Fusion Thunderbird. This rig has one of the most balanced spec sheet out there, weighing up straight-line gaming performance with general PC functionality. Part of the reason the machine functions at all at 4.8GHz is because Chillblast Fusion has used a strong Asus motherboard, where others have used more budget-oriented options.

It has also opted for an overclocked Palit GTX 670 Jetsream in the graphics slot, which delivers frame rates practically on par with those posted by the two machines with GTX 680 cards inside. It's still short of performance compared with the overclocked HD 7970 of the AdvanceTech rig, but then you also get the added loveliness of things like PhysX and TXAA with the Nvidia cards

One of the big bounses of this rig is that it's one of only two PCs in the test with a chunky 240GB SSD as a main OS drive. It's also got a 1TB HDD backing it up for all your data needs, but with the decent SSD installed you could get a large chunk of your current gaming library on those solid state memory chips without things getting too crowded. The Scan machine, the other PC with a 240GB SSD, has a weaker graphics card, and therefore falls well short in the gaming benchmarks. That Mushkin SSD also helps the Fusion Thunderbird get the fastest boot time of the lot.

If it wasn't for the major black mark around the overclock, this review would be sickeningly glowing. Chillblast Fusion has found an excellent balance between the speedy GTX 670 i5 CPU and 240GB SSD. It's not the fastest rig in the test, but it has been intelligently specced-out, despite the Blu-ray drive, and no mistake. You can't argue with that impressive two-year warranty either; good work, Chillblast.

Big, expensive and life-altering? Well, two out of three ain't bad

Like most PC peripherals, monitors mostly sell on price. That's because consumers are largely a feckless bunch of mouth-breathers who can't see past pricing and a small half handful of headline specs. It's $200? It's 27 inches? It's shiny? It's sold. In that context, Samsung slinging out a premium-priced 27-incher is either bold or bonkers.

Samsung's own Series 8 model is around the $800 mark, and recent months have seen a glut of $323 efforts being bought from Korean eBay merchants. Meanwhile, you can pick up a number of 30-inch alternatives for roughly the same money as this 27-inch screen. One thing is for sure - the Series 9 will have to be life-alteringly good.

So what do get? First up is the PLS panel. It's the same type used in the Samsung Series 8 27-inch screen, which is effectively Samsung's take on IPS technology with one or two twists. So far, so good.

Next up is what you might call premium industrial design. That includes a proper metal frame, a brushed metal rear enclosure panel, soft touch controls and a general lifestyle vibe. The stand is height and tilt adjustable, which puts it somewhere between tilt-only cheapo monitors and more widely adjustable pro displays.

Then there's connectivity, which not only includes HDMI, DVI and DisplayPort, but also MHL or Mobile High-Definition Link, which allows you to hook up Android phones. And that's about it. There's no integrated TV tuner or app support. This is a pure PC monitor.

The Series 9 will therefore live or die on a combination of image quality and physical desirability. Unfortunately, we're not entirely convinced by either. The chassis and stand are superficially sexy, but we'd rather have more adjustability and easier access to the inputs. The latter are buried in the base, which makes plugging things in tedious.

Clear as mud

The Series 9's biggest problem involves image quality. That's not a result of a flawed LCD panel - it's lovely. The problem is that it's behind a so-called Crystal Clear Glass panel, so you can't actually see that lovely pannel very well at all.

It's a shame, because Samsung's PLS technology is lovely. You get all the benefits of IPS technology, including superb viewing angles and color accuracy, along with what certainly seems likes improved contrast and definitely involves a smoother, less sparkly anti-glare coating.

Still, the good news is that you can buy the Series 8, which has the same PLS tech, in a more unassuming but actually more ergonomic enclosure, minus the stupid panel cover. Okay, you miss out on the MHL, but it's $485 cheaper, so it's no-brainer.

Technical analysis

IPS stands for In-Plane Switching. PLS stands for Plane to Line Switching. And for the most part, it is indeed a case of I say tomato you say, er, tomato. This analogy isn't really working, but the general gist is that Samsung's PLS technology is very similar to IPS. The biggest difference is that Samsung uses a much nicer, smooth anti glare coating than the horrid, sparkly things you get with most IPS screens. It's a shame it's hidden behind a silly glass cover in the new Series 9.

So, dear, you want to spend how much on a 'home cinema'?

Three thousand of your Earth dollars. That's a hell of a lot of money for a single component, even one as rarefied as a projector. Okay, you can spend tens of thousands on a beamer if you're so inclined and financially endowed, but as we recently discovered, $1,130 or so gets you a very fine example with full 1080p capability.

Put simply, this Epson needs to be seriously nifty. Luckily, it is. We'll get to the profentory bits momentarily, but the fun starts with the extras. First up is the WirelessHD technology.

The idea is fully wireless transmission of lossless HD video. Physically, it involves a separate adapter that plugs into the wall for power, and the source for the images - in our case a PC. It has just a single HDMI input. It's basically a wireless HDMI interface that's equivalent to a wired HDMI 1.4 connection. The projector itself has an integrated WirelessHD interface.

Now, this is the sort of thing that had us sucking our teeth - premonitions of setup headaches, with craptastic frame rates even if we did manage it - that sort of thing. But no, it's as easy to select as any other video input. You just cycle through the digital and analogue settings, hit the wireless option and band, it works. In fact, the results are indistinguishable form using a wired connection. Impressive. Epson claims it has a working range of 10 meters, and we can confirm that it's definitely good for at least five.

Gimme some 3D

The other feature of broad interest is stereoscopic 3D. Active shutter glasses are the drill here (you get a pair), and again, we had no problems getting things running with Nvidia's 3D Vision platform. The only slight snag was the need to run the equivalent of 24GHz refresh at 1,920 x 1,080. That's dandy for movies, but less than ideal for PC gaming.

But what of the projector itself? Well, it's quite simply the finest of its type have seen. As this is an LCD rather than DLP projector you might thing that's damning it with faint praise, but no - this is a superb device by any metric.

Most impressive is the sheer contrast on offer. The black levels are outrageous for an LCD projector, and the result is preposterous detail in darker game and movie scenes. It's incredibly detailed in bright scenes, too. In fact, it's almost too good.

In fact, this is one of the very few projectors we've been happy to run with the lamp in full power mode. Usually that means compromising black levels, but not here. That's partly thanks to Epson's fast acting active iris tech, but also because it just has some damn fine LCD panels and optics.

There's plenty more to be pleased about, including low noise levels and proper lens shift adjustability, which makes it a lot easier to set up.

Technical analysis

The Epson EH-TW9000W brushed aside our suite of test images with nonchalant ease. Perfect gradients, tons of detail in the black and while scales - you name it, the TW9000W nails it. That translates into the finest image ever seen from an LCD projector, and a genuine contender for top honours overall.

Unfortunately, the one thing it doesn't deliver is rapid response. There's simply too much input lag for a pleasant gaming experience. That's an enormous shame. It's still a great movie machine and a truly lovely projector, however, with a whole bunch of great features including WirelessHD and 3D support.

The double-threat of new memory and a new controller. Bold move, Plextor

The overwhelming majority of SSDs on the market now are based around LSI's SandForce SF2281 controller, but there are also quite a few powered by Marvell's 88SS9174 chip. Both of these bits of silicon have been around for a while, so it's about time we saw some new hardware for either or both companies rather than just firmware updates.

First out of the blocks with new hardware is Marvell with the new 88SS9187 Monet controller, which may or may not be the hardware lying under the Indilinx Everest 2 branding in OCZ's Vertex 4 and Agility 4 drive families. In any case, the first drives we have seen flaunting this new silicon come from what many might see as a surprising source - Plextor - in the guise of its new M5 Pro range. A quick glance at the specs reveals that the controller isn't the only thing that's new; these also support the latest 19nm Toshiba Toggle NAND, making them the first consumer drives to do so.

Plextor's M5 Pro range includes two other capacities: the 256GB version and its flagship 512GB drive. It quotes performance figures of up to 540MB/s reads across the board, and while the write performance for the 128GB drive is quoted at up to 340MB/s, both the 256 and 512GB drives get up to 450MB/s. In tests with the ATTO benchmark, 128GB backed up the official read figures, posting a score of 545MB/s. Write performance was a little lower than Plextor's figures at 326GB/s

Slap happy

As benchmarks show, the Plextor M5 Pro can stand up to SandForce drives in outright performance. And when it comes to handling incompressible data writes, it doesn't just hold its own against the likes of the SandForce controlled Patriot Pyro SE - it takes it out into a darkened alley and gives it a good slapping. Not quite as effectively, it has to be said, as the Corsair Performance Pro, but a slapping none the less.

But the new controller isn't the only thing special about the Plextor M5 Pro. The NAND it uses is pretty special too - 19nm Toshiba fancy Dan Toggle NAND no less. This is the first consumer drive and the first drive we have seen that uses the latest Toshiba NAND, and we're pretty sure it won't be on its lonesome for very long.

The 128GB drive uses 256GB of DDR3 cache, and just in case you're wondering, the 256MB version supports 512MB, while in the 512GB drive it goes up to a truly whopping 768MB.

It's a brave step for a company to launch a new drive that features not one but two new technologies, but it seems that Plextor has pulled it off with the M5 Pro. And the combination of the new Marvell controller and the latest 19nm Toggle NAND gives it performance that puts it amongst the fastest 120/128GB drives we've tested. It's also reassuring to see that Plextor has plenty of faith in the M5 Pro series backing it as they do with a five-year warranty. When you also consider the fact you're getting both of these new technologies at around $1/GB, you really can't argue with its credentials.

Technical analysis

The new Marvell 88SS9187 controller can more than hold its own against SandForce controlled drives. It's faster than the previous generation Marvell controller (in the Corsair Performance Pro) in all but one of the AS SSD benchmarks, too.

Sequential read performance

Sequential write performance

4K random write performance

Another excellent premium Z77 mobo from the Taiwanese giant

What do you get for the motherboard that has everything? Gigabyte's answer is to add a pair of Thunderbolt connectors to the rear of its massively feature-rich mobo for all the super-speed I/O goodness they bring. This is the top Z77 board form gigabyte, and has pretty much everything a full-spec $418 mobo should.

Thunderbolt connections are the bastard children of PCIe and DisplayPort, enabling fast, two-way streams of both traditional data and video to be piped down the same cable. As an added bones, you can daisy-chain devices to a single connection - like stringing out external hard drives all the way to a DisplayPort monitor.

Gigabyte adding a pair of these new I/O connectors to its board may just seem like willy-waving, but it means the Z77X-UP5TH has an extra two display outputs, as well as all the speedy data-shunting capabilities. This Z77 board then comes with the ability to run three screens without resorting to discrete graphics, and without sacrificing other I/O capabilities thanks to daisy-chaining.

Thunder road

Still, right now the benefits of Thunderbolt are rather ephemeral. There aren't many DisplayPort panels around at the reasonable prices we've come to expect from the recent IPS boom, and unless you're jamming an SSD into an external Thunderbolt caddy, you'll struggle to get full use from the bandwidth the new connection offers.

It's a worthwhile nod to future-proofing though, and this advanced I/O deserves to do well. I remember wondering whether I really needed to go for USB connections on a mobo upgrade in the years before it became a necessity, and being so glad I did.

But although Thunderbolt is a headline-grabber for this mobo, it's not the only thing in its favor. Gigabyte seemed to lose its way a little in the wilderness, but has come out in force for the 7-series boards, offering serious performance once again.

Gigabyte has played about with the power components around the CPU socket, and by changing the MOSFETs, it has made that part of the board cooler. This means it can cope with more juice, and a little more overclocking fun too.

It loses out slightly in the OC race compared with the similarly priced Asus board over the page, but in a bit of a switch around, where Asus used to be the gaming brand, the Gigabyte board offers faster benchmarks in both Shogun 2 and Batman: Arkham City with the same setup.

Obviously though, we have to consider the price tags of these premium boards. When you can pick up a perfectly functional Z77 for almost $322 less, you have to make some pretty compelling arguments to encourage people to spend more. The performance and incredible feature-set of this board though do a pretty good job.

This isn't board for the gamer on a budget - this is for the person putting their PC together with more professional, productive leanings. And who wants to hit the highest gaming frame rates, too.

Technical analysis

It's a close run thing between the premium Gigabyte and Asus boards, with each offering different benefits. The Asus board is a better overclocker and seem to be able to shift things across the Thunderbolt connector more quickly, but the gaming performance of the Gigabyte board is simply incredible.

CPU rendering performance

Gaming performance

Thunderbolt performance

Well, it's all feeling rather 2010 around here. Nvidia has transported me back to when we couldn't figure out which shower of self-serving idiots to form our government so we just left them to figure it out, a time when Chilean miners starred in their own low-res reality TV show, and a time when we finally found out how destructive a weapon the vuvuzela could be.

Why am I feeling so nostalgic? Because Nvidia has decided to release a new graphics card that' channeling the spirit of one of the worst releases of its last few generations. When I look at the new GTX 660 Ti, all I can see is the frankly offensive spectre of the GTX 465 looming over it.

That was a card housing a pared-to-the-bone version of the then top GPU, offering limited performance for almost the same price as the far superior GTX 470. Two years later and the same can be said of the GTX 660 Ti and impressive GTX 670.

That's a shame, as I've been waiting for the mainstream-oriented GTX 660 Ti to hit the shelves since I first saw the Kepler architecture way back in March this year. Nvidia  brought the top-end GTX 680 out first, aiming squarely at AMD's top GPUs, and to start with it had the edge.

As time has moved on though, the AMD Graphics Core Next architecture - exemplified by the surprisingly excellent HD 7970 GHz Edition - has proven to be a tough nut to crack. As the AMD driver sets have matured and more Compute-focused game engines have emerged, such as those powering DiRT Showdown and Sniper Elite, the Radeon cards have taken the ball and ran with it.

Nvidia was hoping to fight back with the GTX 660 Ti, and in the volume end of the market that's where you want your graphics cards to take the crown. That's where the bulk of the graphics card upgrade money is spent, and it's the segment that can make or break a GPU generation.

This Asus GTX 660 Ti DirectCU II Top is the Taiwanese company's heavy overclocking card and, as such has come to market with seriously tweaked clocks, a bespoke PCB and cooling solution, and a chunky price premium on top.

GPU genes

So what makes up this new mainstream GPU, then? Well, it's the same Kepler GPU that has made up the bulk of Nvidia' 600 series cards. Therefore, it's the GK104 chip, the same as in the GTX 690, GTX 680 and GTX 670. In fact, it's an almost identical chip to that in the most recent Kepler card, the GTX 670, but with a few key parts turned off or turned down.

It's still rocking seven of those SMX modules, so comes with a total of 1,344 CUDA cores, all now running at the same speed as the base clock. It also has the same 112 texture units, but crucially is missing eight ROPs for a reduced total of 24.

The GK104 GPU in the GTX 660 Ti is kept company by the same 2,048MB GDDR5 video memory, running at a breakneck 6,008MHz, though the bus betwixt chip and VRAM is a rather reduced 192-bit affair. Compared with the 256-bit bus used by the rest of the Kepler top-table GPUs, that's a little weak.

The close connection between the chips in the GTX 670 and this GTX 660 Ti explains why there's only $80 difference between the $402 RRP for this latest card and the $482 you can pay for a reference GTX 670.

In the grand scheme of things though, that $80 makes all the difference. When you're talking about the overclocked SKUs of the GTX 660 Ti, like this Asus Top edition, then we start to hit a price parity with the GTX 670 the new Nvidia card can't hope to replicate in terms of gaming frame rates.

To be fair though, Asus's impressive cooling solution meant it could really push the clockspeed of the Nvidia GPU. The base clock for a standard GTX 660 Ti is 915MHz and Asus has upped this to 1,059MHz. In practice, however, that translates to a general boost clock, in game, of around 1,215MHz.

Sadly, even that heavy overclock up to the frame rates that you'd expect from a $482 graphics card. And that's the real problem with this GPU.

Competition

So, what of those frame rates? How does the card Nvidia says will bring next-gen tech to a ton of gamers actually perform? It performs exactly as your might expect to chopped-up GPU to - not very well.

This Top edition has all the advantages of Asus's  overclocking nous, but even that can't push this sliced-up GPU towards the performance of its immediate competition. And that competition is intense. On the Nvidia side you've got the GTX 670 at the same price as this Asus card, on the AMD side there's the HD 7950 at around $418.

Nvidia claimed that the real competition was with the HD 7870, but that can be picked up for around $337 these days,

"PUT IT UP AGAINST THE CHEAPER 7950 AND THINGS LOOK GRIM"

which still considerably cheaper than even the reference GTX 660 Ti at $402.

Let's give Nvidia the benefit of the doubt for a second though and look as its 'new' GPU against the HD 7870. Yes, it's an overall win, with the bulk of titles favoring the green side, but the more compute-focused games like DiRT Showdown and Sniper Elite favor the GCN Pitcairn core in the HD 7870.

Put it up against the HD 7950 though, and things look grim. Even against this seriously over-stretched version of the GTX 660 Ti, the cheaper card has the edge. Only in Shogun 2 can the Nvidia card claim a win - in everything else the HD 7950 is all you need. It also has the performance chops to really work a high-res monitor.

It's downright embarrassing when the GTX 660 Ti faces up to its own big brother, the GTX 670. As we've said, the Asus Top edition is the same price as a stock GTX 670 at $482 and is a long way off it in terms of gaming frame rates. The synthetic Heaven benchmark is generally a good yardstick of overall graphical power and at this the top-end GTX 660 Ti comes up woefully short.

Sad face

You know, sometimes it can be really fun writing a negative review of a product, but occasionally a product is so disappointing there's not an ounce of enjoyment to be had from hoofing it like a lame beggar. We'd expected the GTX 660 Ti to be a serious contender for our favorite GPU of all time. After all, when you combine the goodness of the Kepler architecture (GPU boost, impressive power juggling, and pretties like TXAA and Adaptive Vsync) with a mainstream price tag, how could it fail?

Well, talk to Nvidia and you'll find out. It can certainly fail if you don't bother designing a GPU aimed at the mainstream and instead just hack up the existing chip you've been using for your top-tier gaming cards since March.

The ageing GK104 is a fine GPU when it's being fed with a decent memory bus and hasn't 

"NVIDIA NEEDS TO STEP OUTSIDE AND SMELL THE GLOBAL RECESSION"

been pared to the bone. Hacked up, as it is in the GTX 660 Ti, it's not much good to anyone unless it's significantly cheaper than we're seeing at launch.

At $321 this overclocked Asus Top edition would be a great graphics card, but when it costs the same as the far superior GTX 670, it's completely irrelevant. Even the EVGA GTX 660 Ti SC with its $402 tag is too expensive, losing out to the slightly faster HD 7950 at the same price.

It's not like this is a new precedent either. I'm referring again to the familiar situation that arose when Nvidia was getting into the mainstream segment of its first generation Fermi cards.

After the GTX 470 came the GTX 465. It was using the same GF100 GPU Nvidia was putting in its top-end cards, but with a lot of the chip's innate goodness cut out. Nvidia also positioned it only slightly cheaper than the much faster GTX 470. It was roundly panned as a pointless release and was superseded in around a month by the fantastic GTX 670 and its new GF104 GPU.

We can only hope the same thing happen here and we'll see a new Kepler GPU, specifically designed for the mainstream segment, in a GTX 660 without the Ti moniker - and for a more mainstream price. Seriously, when did  $402-$482 become the mainstream pricing for graphics cards?

After a run of really very good graphics cards, Nvidia needs to step outside and smell the global recession. Bring me my real mainstream Kepler card, not this pretender to the throne.

The very first thing to catch your eye on this Advance Technologies build is the striking XPredator chassis, all stormtrooper white with black grills getting all up in yours. It also has a huge Perspex side panel, which reveals the second thing to catch your eye - the water-cooling setup.

This isn't the only build in the test to feature liquid as an aid to chilling out your chips - the Cyberpower machine has a closed-loop water cooler - but this is the only one to use a separate pump and reservoir setup. That means the setup can be expanded if you decide you want to include a loop for the graphics card, or even stick another reservoir in between to provide extra cooling for both.

Sadly though, the extreme (and extremely pretty) water-cooling setup in this machine hasn't translated into a serious over clock on the CPU inself. In fact, the ATFX rig ships with the slowest clocks of all the i5 machines in the test, sitting on its laurels at a mere 4.3GHz.

That means Advance Technologies garners the slowest CPU benchmark of all nine test PCs here. That's a big disappointment considering how intense the setup looks. With a little light tweaking - a simple bumping of the multiplier in the BIOS - we were able to get a rock-solid 4.7GHz out of the 3570K.

It's swings and traffic circles though, as it's the only machine here to opt for an AMD graphics card over and Nvidia one, and in the benchmarks that really makes a difference. The overclocked HD 7970 may not have the edge in the HEaven synthetic test, but in the four gaming benchmarks it pulls out a very obvious lead.

The only fly in the ointment here is Advance Technologies questionable decision to ship the setup with the Lucid Virtu tech plumbing the CPU and GPU together in-game. In Just Cause 2 and Metro 2033 it made no difference in performance, but it gave a little boost to DiRT Showdown.

The Shogun 2 test was a different matter, showing a massive performance boost, but that was tempered by the terrible graphical errors that accompanied it - something we couldn't live with, and would lead to us immediately turning off the Lucid Hyperformance mode.

That perhaps explains why no-one else wanted to get with the Lucind lovin', but on the flip side Advance Technologies was also the only SI to actually enablethe Intel Smart Response Tech with the small SSD. Pairing the SSD and HDD together meant it felt almost as responsive as a full SSD system, and had the same boot time too.

So it's a bit of a mixed bag for the ATFX rig then; steller gaming benchmarks but weak CPU performance. With some BIOS tweaking you can sort that out, but should really have to when you've put down a grand for a PC? We're not entirely sure about that chassis either. From a distance it looks the business, but up close it feels like a budget options. It doesn't have a reset switch, either. Weird. But still, a great looking, strong gaming machine, with a good balance of components.