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Wired2Fire has pushed the Intel Core i5-3570k inside its Hellspawn Ultima with a hefty overclock, giving it a 4.6GHz clock speed. Combined with dedicated Nvidia graphics and OCZ SSD, it’s an incredibly fast mid-range PC.
In order to achieve the large overclock, the stock Intel heat sink has been replaced with a Xigmatek tower cooler which is much more capable. Wired2Fire also chose a Xigmatek case, the Asgard, for the basis of the system. One 120mm front intake and one 120mm rear exhaust provide ample airflow, but there are two additional 120mm fan mounts on the side panel if you add extra components at a later date.
The case looks fairly generic from the outside, with one 3.5in and four 5.25in drive bays. A DVD optical drive takes up one bay, but the rest are free for future upgrades. The I/O ports, as well as the power and reset switches, are positioned in the centre of the front panel, which should be within easy reach even if you position the case on the floor. You only get two USB ports, as well as the usual 3.5mm audio jacks, so you’ll need to connect most peripherals to the back of the case.
The Asus P8Z77-V LX motherboard’s back panel has four USB ports, two faster USB3, Gigabit Ethernet and one PS/2 port. Audio connectivity includes three 3.5mm analogue jacks for 5.1 surround sound, and one digital optical output. VGA, DVI and HDMI ports let you use the integrated graphics built in to the Intel processor, but the dedicated graphics card is significantly faster.
Inside, there are five empty 3.5in bays. Two are taken up by the OCZ 64GB SSD and 1TB hard disk. The drive cages use tool-free retention mechanisms, so you shouldn’t need to break out the screwdriver just to fit a hard disk. The dual-slot graphics card takes up one PCI-Express x16 slot and obscures a PCI-E x1 slot, but the motherboard still has room for expansion. There are three PCI ports and one PCI-E x16 slot free for upgrades.
In terms of performance, the overclocked processor is more than fast enough for everyday desktop tasks. It’s a quad-core model, so heavily multithreaded applications will run smoothly. This includes our multimedia benchmarks, and the Hellspawn Ultima managed to score 141 overall.
The AMD Radeon HD 7770 is an overclocked Asus model, so it should perform slightly quicker than other stock-clocked models. This could be seen in our gaming benchmarks, where Dirt3 produced an average frame rate of 41.7fps. Crysis 2 was significantly more demanding, only reaching 21.1fps. If you want to play the latest games, you’ll have to drop detail settings or disable anti-aliasing.
Wired2Fire sells the Hellspawn Ultima with a 24in, Full HD Asus VS247H monitor. It’s a matt display, so light reflections shouldn’t be a problem, with an even LED backlight and the option of DVI, VGA and HDMI inputs. The Keysonic keyboard is fairly generic, as is the Gigabyte mouse, but they are at least better than some bargain basement peripherals.
With an SSD and a heavily overclocked processor, the Hellspawn Ultima is definitely fast. If frame rates are your main concern, the similarly priced Palicomp Alpha Excite may be a better choice, but there’s little to fault with this system.
