Our poor receptionist didn’t quite know what to do when Altech’s monolithic machine turned up. She had a point.

At 36kg and 56cm in height, this metal-cased behemoth is truly immense. The VapoChill Extreme Edition case is actually a miditower case with a refrigeration unit on top. A large rubber pipe leading down to the CPU and the machine physically jolts when you turn it on. It’s just unfortunate that instead of a satisfying V8 growl, or more importantly, abject silence, several fans kick in giving a noisy, if constant drone.

Four 80GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 hard disks run in a RAID 0 array giving a formatted capacity of 298GB – disappointing considering the price. There are also two ApertVision 7800GTX graphics cards running in SLI mode, two 512MB sticks of speedy Corsair TWINX- 3200XL and, the piece de resistance, an Athlon FX-57 processor. The latter is AMD’s fastest, non-dual core chip (see side bar). The extreme cooling is necessary as Altech has overclocked the 2.8GHz chip to 3.31GHz. All of this is plugged into a fine-tuned Abit AN8 SLI Fatal1ty nForce 4 Ultra motherboard and the whole system is monitored via the uGuru front panel which displays various system temperatures and fan speeds.

By scoring 6138 PCMarks in PCMark 04, it can claim to be the fastest consumer PC on the market. Naturally, it’s no slouch at 3D work either. It scored 12,227 and 10,786 3DMarks at 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200 respectively in 3Dmark 05. In our grueling real-world Far Cry tests it managed 82fps at 1280 x 1024 which dropped to 60fps when HDR was turned on. At 1600 x 1200 it managed 80fps without HDR and 44fps with it.

Other features include a basic Microsoft keyboard and optical mouse set and only one modest 16x DVD+R, 2.4x DVD+R9 DL optical drive – a bit stingy considering the price paid. At least the Samsung Syncmaster 930BF (September 2005, page 70) monitor is a great performer. The display quality is top notch and the 4ms response time enforces the systems gaming pedigree.

However, the 1280 x 1024 native resolution throttles the 3D power making at least one 7800GTX redundant.

Connectivity comes at the front via the uGuru panel, which provides two USB 2, a FireWire, headphone and microphone ports. This also monitors temperatures and fan speeds. The covered button at the front is a bad inclusion though, as pressing it wipes your CMOS settings (losing the overclock and RAID information leaving you with a dead PC).

There’s also a riser for the six eight-channel audio connectors but unfortunately no speakers are included.

All in all it’s a mighty machine, though having so much 3D power is wasted on a low resolution monitor. However, if money is no object and you want the ultimate gaming system with serious future headroom, this is it.