SCAN 3XS Gamer

VERDICT

You can’t overclock it, but with its premium Coffee Lake chip, the 3XS Gamer is already a multitalented powerhouse

- James Archer

INTEL’S 8th-GEN Coffee Lake CPUs are out, which means so are the pre-built PCs based around them. The first to arrive in our labs is Scan’s premium 3XS Gamer, and while you might not have guessed it after seeing the price, it has a few things in place to keep the cost down – at least, by high-end standards.

For starters, rather than the flagship Core i7-8700K (which we’ll be reviewing next issue), Scan has opted for the non-overclockable Core i7-8700, and a standard SATA SSD instead of an ultra-fast NVMe drive. The 3XS Gamer also makes do with air cooling, which is hard to argue with when overclocking is off the table.

BREWED AWAKENING

When we first learned that Coffee Lake chips would cut down on core clock speeds in favour of higher core counts, we were worried that gaming performance – Intel’s key advantage over AMD Ryzen alternatives – would be hurt in the process. Indeed, while both the Core i7-8700 has the same six cores (up two on the Kaby Lake Core i7-7700) and 12 threads as the Core i7-8600K, it has a lower core clock of 3.2GHz to the K-series chip’ 3.7GHz.

Intel seems to have worked around this with massive Turbo Boost speed increases. In the Core i7-8700’s case, it can jump all the way to 4.6GHz, higher than the old Core i7-7700K’s 4.5GHz boost clock and just 100MHz lower than the Core i7-8700K’s.