Gladiator Titan Prometheus Gaming PC Review

Gladiator Titan Prometheus Gaming PC Review

Manufacturer: Aria PC Technology
UK Price (as reviewed): £1,299.98 (inc VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): Not available

With Intel, AMD, ATI and Nvidia recently having laid their hardware cards on the table, now is a great time to survey the market and finally make those tough buying decisions. Or you could let a system builder such as Gladiator do the hard work for you with a system such as the Titan Prometheus, a high-end system that’s stuffed with some of the tastiest tech treats available. For a reasonable £1,300, you also receive a healthy dollop of overclocking sauce, dispensing with the need to fiddle in the BIOS to achieve your ascendancy to 4GHz CPU speeds.


At the heart of the Titan Prometheus is a 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5870, our favourite single-GPU high-speed graphics card. It’s ideal for gaming at high resolutions such as 1,920 x 1,200, even when you crank up the anti-aliasing and eye candy. While the card in the Prometheus is a reference model, we’ve found the HD 5870 to be reasonably well behaved when it comes to heat and noise output, so the stock cooler doesn’t count against the system at all.

Grabbing the headlines alongside the HD 5870 is an overclocked Intel Core i7-930 processor. While this CPU’s stock clock speed is a meaty 2.8GHz, Gladiator has overclocked it to 4GHz, thanks to a QPI of 191MHz and the chip’s 21x multiplier. To achieve this, Gladiator has increased the CPU vcore to 1.33V, the QPI VTT to 1.375V and the DRAM voltage to 1.66V.


Holding the CPU within its metal grasp is a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R, an all-round excellent motherboard. It’s spiced up by the inclusion of four SATA 6Gbps ports and two USB 3 ports, meaning that it’s as future-proof as an Intel motherboard can be at the moment.

Specifications

• CPU 2.8GHz Intel Core i7-930 overclocked to 4GHz
  
• Memory 6GB of DDR3 at 1,528MHz
  
• Graphics 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5870
  
• Sound Intel HD audio via Realtek ALC889 with 8-channel support
  
• Hard disk Two 320GB Samsung SpinPoint F1 in RAID 0, one 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3
  
• Optical drives Sony Optiarc AD-5240S 24x DVD±RW Drive
  
• Case Antec Twelve Hundred
  
• Cooling CPU: Corsair H50; Case: 3 x 120mm intake fans, 2 x 120mm exhaust fans, 1 x 200mm exhaust fan
  
• PSU Antec CP850W
  
• Ports Front: 2 x USB 2, headphone, mic, eSATA. Rear: 2 x USB 3, 5 x USB 2, FireWire, mini-FireWire, eSATA, 2 x DVI, HDMI, 2 x Gigabit LAN, 4 x surround sound audio out, mic, headphone, digital S/PDIF in/out
  
• Extras Windows 7 Home Premium