Gladiator Titan Prometheus Gaming PC Review

Results Analysis

With a hefty 4GHz overclocked CPU, we expected the Prometheus to deliver a similarly impressive return in our Media Benchmarks, and it didn’t disappoint. An overall score of 2,129 is fantastic, especially for a system without an SSD.

In our Crysis test, the Prometheus was similarly imperious, with the HD 5870 delivering plenty of performance. An average frame rate of 57fps and a minimum of 38fps at 1,680 x 1,050 with 2x AA show that there’s tons of gaming performance.

With our usual battery of benchmarks completed, we fired up Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA, 16x AF and maximum image quality to really give the system a challenge. The Prometheus performed superbly, delivering smooth frame rates and great visuals even on busy 32-player servers filled with explosions, dust and vehicles.

We also played Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, which is one of our most demanding graphics tests at higher resolutions. The Prometheus performed very well, with smooth, playable gameplay even at 1,920 x 1,200 with AA enabled.

Despite its already hefty overclock, we were keen to see how much extra juice we could squeeze from the Prometheus and eagerly dived into the BIOS. Pleasingly, Gladiator ships the system pretty close to its limits, and we were only able to wring an extra 100MHz from the CPU by raising the QPI to 195MHz, knocking the CPU vcore up a notch to 1.375V in the process.

We know that the i7-930 can run at 4.3GHz in the Gigabyte motherboard, but we found that we couldn’t add more vcore above 1.375V, as the CPU would overheat. This isn’t a great endorsement of the H50 cooler, given the masses of airflow throughout the case. Nevertheless, our 4.1GHz overclock saw the overall score improve to 2,174.

The HD 5870 was much more approachable, and we were easily able to overclock the GPU to 900MHz and the memory to 1.3GHz (5.2GHz effective). The combined overclocks produced an average frame rate of 61fps in our Crysis test, with a minimum of 39fps.

Conclusion

The Gladiator Titan Prometheus is undoubtedly an extremely powerful system, combining a great graphics card with a CPU that’s fast even before the heavy overclock. While the internal build of the PC isn’t immaculate, all the components are where they should be, although the two-drive RAID array and the Corsair H50 cooler are weak choices for this case. The former yields no significant benefit, while the latter clearly limited the overclocking potential of this system. We were disappointed to find the Prometheus configured to be pretty noisy too.

However, the Prometheus’ trump card is its incredibly keen price. At a penny under £1,300, this system costs less than it would to buy all the individual components from a retailer and build the system yourself. It also includes a warranty for the overclock. However, there’s enough about the Prometheus for us to leave it on its shelf, and look elsewhere for a high-performance PC.

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Design
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Hardware
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

Score Guide