Gladuator Retiarius Extreme GTX review

Most powerful PCs equipped with the latest dual-core processors and blisteringly fast graphics cards are distractingly loud, as huge cooling fans work overtime to prevent the system overheating.

The Retiarius Extreme GTX base system promises to break this trend and provide great performance without the racket.

PCs such as Dell's Dimension 5150c become much louder when straining to complete strenuous tasks such as video encoding. The Retiarius had no such problem. It isn't completely silent, but we had to press our ears against its sleek black Antec Sonata case to hear anything. Its fans are silent and its insulation dampens the sound of internal components such as hard disks.

The Retiarius also delivers great performance. It is equipped with an overclocked dual-core AMD Opteron processor (2.3GHz from the standard 1.8GHz), which is usually found in servers or high-end workstations. It tore through our video-encoding test and made short work of our image-editing and multi-tasking benchmarks. The Retiarius should have no trouble handling whatever you throw at it.

This PC's 3D performance is equally impressive. The 256MB nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card is a great performer, so we weren't surprised that it steamed its way through our Doom 3 and Call of Duty 2 tests. It wasn't quite as fast as the Radeon X1900XTX system from Mesh (opposite), but it wasn't far behind, especially in our strenuous Call of Duty 2 benchmark test.

For even better 3D performance in the future, you can add another graphics card, since the Retiarius is SLI-capable. However, the existing 7800 graphics card is fitted with a special fan, so be careful: unless you add another equally quiet card, you could compromise the PC's blissful silence.

Storage is well catered for by two 250GB hard disks in a RAID 0 array. This gives 500GB of fast storage, but if either drive should fail you'll lose all your data. Fortunately, the two-layer DVD writer gives you a way of making backups. There are three PCI slots but one is already blocked off by the riser for the USB2 and serial ports, and the others would be rendered useless if you added another graphics card.

The Retiarius system has no monitor, keyboard or mouse; it is ideally suited for people keeping their existing peripherals and replacing their base unit. While complete systems with comparable or better performance are available for just £200 more, they won't be as quiet. If you want top-notch performance without the noise and you already have all the peripherals you need, the Retiarius Extreme GTX is an excellent choice.