1st Dream PC unveiled - the Beast Cerberus

The Beast Cerberus unveiled

Every year Custom PC challenges the world's leading professional PC builders to craft the most technologically advanced, innovative, eye-catching PCs they can. We call this competition Dream PCs, and here is the first entry - the water-cooled Beast Cerberus.

In Beast's own words 'To us, a Dream PC has to meet two criteria: it must be seriously fast and it must look amazing. Initially, we designed a liquid-to-liquid TEC cooler. This had a theoretical cooling power of well over 300W, but we could still run the TECs from a single power supply, making it relatively compact.

'After excellent initial results, we upped the clock speeds and saw the limitations of the design. We decided to build a purely liquid-cooled system. The inherent inefficiency of TEC cooling, the cost of production and the rule that the more complicated it is, the more things can go wrong, were key factors in this decision.'

Here's a teaser video of the Beast Cerberus for you to feast your eyes upon.


Beast continues 'The resulting system contains some of the best components you can buy. We selected a 3-way SLI setup for two reasons: less overall heat and better scaling of three faster versus four slower GPUs.

'The Core i7- 920 is cooled with the excellent all-copper Heatkiller 3.0 waterblock and achieves near parity with the i7-975, so it’s much better value. Corsair Dominator GT memory provides us with low latencies and massive bandwidth. Four Corsair SSDs give sustained read/write speeds that approach the bandwidth limits of the Intel ICH10R controller.

'The cooling is provided by a Thermochill PA120.4 radiator for the CPU and chipset loop. Its relatively low airflow requirements, combined with the 38mm Scythe Ultra Kaze fans, allow very quiet operation. The GPU/memory loop is cooled by a Swiftech MCR320 triple radiator with the Scythe S-Flex fans which, given the space limitations, offers the best possible cooling, but remains quiet.

'We opted for the versatile SilverStone TJ07. However, partly for aesthetic and partly for performance reasons, we flipped the layout. With a custom motherboard tray, back and front plates, and every single rivet and screw replaced, the system has a very clean, stylish look. Every inch of cable is braided (60m of braiding) making the wires a feature and not something to be hidden. We’ve anodised the side panels to match the red and black theme, and cut a square window in the side to show off as much of the incredible internals as possible.

'We believe this is the best-looking PC we’ve ever designed; with a lot of hard work and a large degree of skill, we’ve produced a PC that looks fantastic and has performance to match.

The full review of the Beast Cerberus, along with this year's four other Dream PCs, will be published in bit-tech's sister magazine, Custom PC, on-sale 22 October. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts in the forums.