First up - The Fanless Quiet PC. Ranking fourth (outta four), brute force merely isn’t enough, even when delivered completely silently. Fully-body heatsinks, water-cooling, no fans.

It wasn’t easy for Quiet PC to build the Jaguar, as several mods were required to keep everything cool and stable. For example, three of the six heatpipes that connect the overclocked 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU to the case are obstructed by the standard VRM heatsinks on the Intel 975X motherboard. To get around this problem, Quiet PC desoldered the standard VRM heatsinks and replaced them with shorter Zalman models. Due to its 400W passively cooled PSU, the system doesn’t have enough juice to power a pair of Radeon X1900-series cards in CrossFire, so Quiet PC elected for a single MSI GeForce 7900 GTX card. However, again, to keep heat under control, Quiet PC hasn’t overclocked the GPU or the memory.

The graphics card is hooked up to a gorgeous 24in Dell 2407WFP widescreen TFT, the same monitor that Scan supplied with its Dream PC, which has an eye-popping native resolution of 1,920 x 1,200. In keeping with the silent theme, Quiet PC opted to fit a quiet Samsung SpinPoint T HD400LJ hard disk inside the Jaguar, which is also cooled by a system of heatpipes. It may not be as fast as a Raptor X, but it’s a hell of a lot quieter. And, as there’s only room inside the TNN 500AF for one hard disk drive, its generous 400GB capacity is very welcome. The optical drive is the same S-ATA Samsung SH-W163 drive that won our recent DVD burner Labs test.

Next the formidable Voodoo Omen. Sheer power and a shiny case won’t win you any medals specced up against these babies. Third place.

No Dream PC would be complete without a killer graphics setup, and the OMEN i121x certainly has plenty of gaming horsepower, thanks to a pair of overclocked Radeon X1900XT graphics cards configured together in CrossFire mode. Once again, the choice of overclock is rather strange. This is because, while the GPUs have been overclocked from 625MHz to 655MHz, the RAM runs at its stock frequency of 725MHz (1.45GHz effective). As high-end GPUs are constrained by a lack of memory bandwidth, particularly at high resolutions, this is a strange choice to make, especially as the massive Danger Den Tyee waterblocks that Voodoo PC has fitted to each card cools both the GPU and memory modules.

Games and applications can be quickly installed from the Pioneer DVD writer onto the 150GB Raptor X drive, or one of the two massive 750GB Seagate hard disks. As with all of the Dream PCs, the OMEN i121x is supplied with a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music sound card, along with a set of the floor-thumpingly loud Logitech Z-5500 Digital surround-sound speakers. The Samsung SyncMaster 244T 24in widescreen TFT is even more impressive than the Dell 2407WFP bundled with some of the other Dream PCs, and offers the same razor-sharp native resolution of 1,920 x 1,200.

The Scan Black Rhino, entering the arena priced at a whopping £7,000. Big case. Big power. Big cooling. Water style. Second only to Vadim - the Scan puts up a valiant fight, eventually being overthrown only by the almighty Chepheus.

2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 to 3.84GHz. This is achieved by raising the multiplier from 11 to 12, and the FSB from 266MHz (1,066MHz effective) to 320MHz (1.28GHz effective). By using an 2:3 FSB to RAM ratio in the BIOS of the Asus 975X motherboard, Scan has also overclocked the four 1GB sticks of Corsair XMS2-8500 DDR2 RAM to 480MHz (960MHz effective) at 5 - 5 - 5 - 15 timings. The GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card also gets some attention, and Scan has increased the GPU speeds from 500MHz to 580MHz and the RAM from 600MHz (1.2GHz effective) to 700MHz (1.4GHz effective).

This monster graphics card is partnered with an equally ostentatious Dell 2407WFP 24in widescreen TFT, which has a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,200. Also present is a Sound Blaster X-Fi connected to an awesome set of Logitech Z-5500 Digital 5.1 speakers. The input peripherals comprise a Logitech G5 mouse and the rather over-the-top Logitech G15 keyboard.

The Vadim Cepheus. Undisputed winner. King of all kings. Yadayadayah.

The Cepheus has a Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU that’s been overclocked from 2.93GHz to 3.6GHz by increasing its multiplier from 11 to 12 and the FSB from 266MHz (1,066MHz effective) to 300MHz (1.2GHz effective). The memory divider in the Asus P5W DH Deluxe 975X motherboard’s BIOS is set to 4:5, which forces the 2GB of Patriot DDR2 memory to run at a heady 500MHz (1GHz effective) with tight 4 - 4 - 4 - 12 timings. Data is fed into this number-crunching overclocked CPU and RAM by a pair of 150GB WD Raptor X hard drives configured in a RAID 0 array. A further 500GB of storage is provided by a Seagate hard drive. All three hard drives are mounted inside Zalman heatpipe coolers that help to conduct heat away from the drives and into the case. There are also two optical drives: a Pioneer dual-layer DVD burner and a Sony DVD/CD-RW combo drive.

The graphics cards are a pair of Sapphire Radeon X1900-series cards configured in CrossFire. As the waterblocks cover the memory modules and GPUs of both cards, Vadim has overclocked both, raising the GPUs from 650MHz to 690MHz and the RAM from 775MHz (1.55GHz effective) to 790MHz (1.58GHz effective). Originally, the cards were overclocked higher, but a bug in the Catalyst 6.6 driver caused the cards to continually lose their clock frequency settings.

Inspired my Matt - Tested by CPC.