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The Asus bios is very indepth and offers plenty of tuning option for overclocking. Obviously, the Wired2Fire engineers have already tweaked all of this, claiming a 1.5 ghz overclock to 4.8ghz.
Wired2Fire have tweaked various settings, and because they are using the ThermalTake Frio, they are able to crank the CPU voltage to 1.48, which is safe long term. The Corsair DDR3 memory is configured at to 1866mhz @ 9-10-9-27 (1T) timings.
Above, the overclocked settings, pushing the Core i5 2500k from 3.3ghz to 4.8ghz. Incredible how easy this is, really. The GTX570 is a great graphics card and we are pleased to see one in the Wired2Fire system – these are really fast discrete solutions and very competitively priced. This card runs at 732mhz core clock and 950 mhz from the GDDR5 memory.
Wired2Fire supplied the system with the latest WHQL Nvidia driver. We updated this to the latest beta (V285.38) as it features many bug fixes and performance enhancements.
System validation is available over here.
The Windows Experience Index is a useful little tool, even if it just gives a rough overview. We can see that the system is being limited by the mechanical hard drive, scoring 5.9. This system doesn't take an average of all 5 sections, it simply takes the worst score as the final rating.
Wired2Fire have included the small 20GB Intel SSD for use as a caching system. This helps increase overall system responsiveness, rather than depending totally on a mechanical drive. We will test this later in the review.
A screenshot of the system, as we received it, right out of the box. One of the cleanest installs we have seen in recent months.
Nice system, not so sure about the caching system mind you, but I have never been sold on Intels tech in this regard. Id much rather have a small SSD as a standalone drive for boot.
Nice case, and good performance. Seems the UK market is heating up lately. Nice to have alernatives from dell etc.
I agree completely, great system, but let down by the frio. I bought a frio and even at the lowest fan settings, they were annoying me. they emit a ‘whir’ sound, like a high pitched whine. Very annoying and I had to replace the cooler completely because of it.
I like this a lot. I havent heard the frio but ive read a lot of positive reviews about how good the cooling is. shame about thos efans.
Seems ok, but I dont know about that SSD caching thing, seems a bit of a ‘patch’ to fix a slow hard drive.