Velocity XFire: Phenom II
First up, the Wired2Fire Velocity XFire.
Chassis aficionados will recognise the beastly Cooler Master HAF 932 chassis. It's a well-received chassis that's a decent-enough base for a high-end gaming PC. A sensible, safe choice with a voluminous interior and good cooling potential.
The choice of chassis, and practically all the components, can be made at the time of purchase via an online configurator, incidentally.
Notice the four DVI outputs and the XFire name? A peek inside will show that it's a Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2,048MB graphics card that is our current pick if spending around £250 on a single-card solution.
Wired2Fire's gone down the route of using well-established components rather than OEM parts. Inside, the AMD Phenom II 940 is pre-overclocked from a native 3.0GHz to 3.6GHz using a Thermalright Ultra 120R heatsink and Enermax Twister 120mm fan. Our 12-hour stability test failed at around the five-hour mark yet ran for the full 12 hours when set to a default 3.0GHz speed. The exact nature of the failure was hard to pinpoint, however. Ignore the 850W PSU here; retail samples ship with the 700W model as on the Intel system.
Backed up by 4GB of Corsair DDR2 natively specified at 800MHz but running pre-overclocked at 900MHz, with both sat on top of an ASUS 790GX motherboard, the guts of the system are good. Cabling, too, is tidy with no wires running across the motherboard.
Providing the graphics' oomph is the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2,048MB card. As tested, it was rather noisy when idle, but subsequent BIOSes have quietened it down some.
